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UAt-l^M 



S. A. fCETOii-, FKOXC »1>A« 



CONFESSIONS 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 



BY 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 



BOSTON: 
TICKNOR, REED, AND FIELDS. 

M DCCC LII. 



p\<^; 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, by 

TiCKNOR, Reed, and Fields, 

In the Clerk's OflBce of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. 

Mr.. Menw" -'•'»•""«• 
April 26, 1»33 



Stereotyped by 

HOBART & ROBBINS, 

BOSTON. 



CONFESSIONS 



OF 



AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, 



BEING AN EXTRACT FROM 



THE LIFE OF A SCHOLAR. 



FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER. 

I HERE present you, courteous reader, with the 
record of a remarkable period of my Hfe ; accord- 
ing to my application of it, I trust that it will 
prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a 
considerable degree, useful and instructive. In 
that hope it is that I have drawn it up; and that 
must be my apology for breaking through that del- 
icate and honorable reserve, which, for the most 
part, restrains us from the public exposure of our 
own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is 
more revolting to English feelings, than the spec- 
tacle of a human being obtruding on our notice 
his moral ulcers, or scars, and tearing away that 
" decent drapery " which time, or indulgence to 
human frailty, may have drawn over them : 
accordingly, the greater part of our confessions 
(that is. spontaneous and extra-judicial confes- 



VIII FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER. 

sions) proceed from demireps, adventiirerSj or 
swindlers; and for any such acts of gratuitous self- 
humiliation from those who can be supposed in 
sympathy with the decent and self-respecting part 
of society, we must look to French literature, or to 
that part of the German which is tainted with the 
spurious and defective sensibility of the French. 
All this I feel so forcibly, and so nervously am I 
alive to reproach of this tendency, that I have for 
many months hesitated about the propriety of 
allowing this, or any part of my narrative, to come 
before the public eye, until after my death (when, 
for many reasons, the whole will be published) : 
and it is not without an anxious review of the rea- 
sons for and against this step, that I have, at last, 
concluded on taking it. 

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, 
from public notice: they court privacy and solitude; 
and, even in the choice of a grave, will sometimes 
sequester themselves from the general population 
of the church-yard, as if declining to claim fellow- 
ship with the great family of man, and wishing (in 
the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth) 

Humbly to express 

A penitential loneliness. 

It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us 



FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER. IX 

all, that it should be so; nor would I willingly, in 
my own person, manifest a disregard of such salu- 
tary feelings ; nor in act or word do anything to 
weaken them. But, on the one hand, as my self- 
accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt, 
so, on the other, it is possible that, if it did, the bene- 
fit resulting to others, from the record of an experi- 
ence purchased at so heavy a price, might compen- 
sate, by a vast over-balance, for any violence done 
to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach 
of the general rule. Infirmity and misery do not, 
of necessity, imply guilt. They approach, or 
recede from, the shades of that dark alliance, 
in proportion to the probable motives and pros- 
pects of the offender, and the palliations, known 
or secret, of the offence ; in proportion as the 
temptations to it were potent from the first, and 
the resistance to it, in act or in effort, was ear- 
nest to the last. For my own part, without breach 
of truth or modesty, I may affirm, that my life has 
been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher : from 
my birth I was made an intellectual creature; and 
intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and 
pleasures have been, even from my school-boy 
days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and 
if I am bound to confess that I have indulged 



X FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER. 

in it to an excess, not yet recorded'^ of any other 
man, it is no less true, that I have struggled 
against this fascinating enthralment with a relig- 
ious zeal, and have at length accomplished what 
I never yet heard attributed to any other man — 
have untwisted, almost to its final links, the 
accursed chain which fettered me. Such a self- 
conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbal- 
ance to any kind or degree of self-indulgence. Not 
to insist that, in my case, the self-conquest was 
unquestionable, the self-indulgence open to doubts 
of casuistry, according as that name shall be 
extended to acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, 
or shall be restricted to such as aim at the excite- 
ment of positive pleasure. 

Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge ; and, if 
I did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the 
present act of confession, in consideration of the 
service which I may thereby render to the whole 
class of opium-eaters. But who are they? Reader, 
I am sorry to say, a very numerous class indeed. 
Of this I became convinced, some years ago, by 
computing, at that time, the number of those in 
one small class of EngUsh society (the class of men 

* "Not yet recorded,'' I say ; for there is one celebrated man of 
the present day, who, if all be true which is reported of him, has 
greatly exceeded me in quantity. 



FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER. XI 

distinguished for talent, or of eminent station) who 
were known to me, directly or indirectly, as opium- 
eaters ; such, for instance, as the eloquent and 

benevolent ; the late Dean of ■ ; Lord 

; Mr. , the philosopher; a late under- 
secretary of state (who described to me the sensa- 
tion which first drove him to the use of opium, in 

the very same words as the Dean of , namely, 

''that he felt as though rats were gnawing and 

abrading the coats of his stomach"); Mr. ; 

and many others, hardly less known, whom it 
would be tedious to mention. Now, if one class, 
comparatively so limited, could furnish so many 
scores of cases (and that within the knowledge 
of one single inquirer), it was a natural inference, 
that the entire population of England would fur- 
nisb a proportionable number. The soundness of 
this inference, however, I doubted, until some facts 
became known to me, which satisfied me that it 
was not incorrect. I will mention two: 1. Three 
respectable London druggists, in widely remote 
quarters of London, from whom I happened lately 
to be purchasing small quantities of opium, assured 
me that the number of amateur opium-eaters (as 
I may term them) was, at this time, immense ; and 
that the difficulty of distinguishing these persons, 
to whom habi-t had rendered opium necessary, 



XII FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER. 

from such as were purchasing it with a view to 
suicide, occasioned them daily trouble and dis- 
putes. This evidence respected London only. 
But, 2 (which will possibly surprise the reader 
more), some years ago, on passing through Man- 
chester, I was informed by several cotton manu- 
facturers that their work-people were rapidly 
getting into the practice of opium-eating ; so much 
so, that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of 
the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, 
or three grains, in preparation for the known 
demand of the evening. The immediate occa- 
sion of this practice was the lowness of wages, 
which, at that time, would not allow them to 
indulge in ale or spirits; and, Avages rising, it may 
be thought that this practice would cease : but, 
as I do not readily believe that any man, having 
once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will 
afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoy- 
ments of alcohol, I take it for granted 

That those eat now who never ate before ; 
And those who always ate now eat the more. 

Indeed, the fascinating powers of opium are 
admitted, even by medical writers who are its 
greatest enemies : thus, for instance, Awsiter, 
apothecary to Greenwich Hospital, in his " Essay 



FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER. XIH 

on the Effects of Opium" (published in the year 
1763), when attempting to explain why Mead had 
not been sufficiently explicit on the properties, 
counter-agents, &c., of this drug, expresses him- 
self in the following mysterious terms {(povovna 
avvBToim) : '' Perhaps he thought the subject of too 
delicate a nature to be made common; and as 
many people might then indiscriminately use it, 
it would take from that necessary fear and caution, 
which should prevent their experiencing the exten- 
sive power of this drug ; for there are many 'prop- 
erties in it^ if universally known^ that would habit- 
uate the use^ and make it more in request with us 
than the Turks themselves ; the result of which 
knowledge," he adds, "must prove a general mis- 
fortune." In the necessity of this conclusion I do 
not altogether concur ; but upon that point I shall 
haye occasion to speak at the close of my Confes- 
sions, where I shall present the reader with the 
moral of my narrative. 



PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS, 



These preliminary confessions, or introductory nar- 
rative of the youthful adventures which laid the founda- 
tion of the writer's habit of opium-eating in after life, 
it has been judged proper to premise, for three several 
reasons : 

1. As forestalling that question, and giving it a satis- 
factory answer, which else would painfully obtrude itself 
in the course of the Opium Confessions — " How came 
any reasonable being to subject himself to such a yoke 
of misery, voluntarily to incur a captivity so servile, 
and knowingly to fetter himself with such a seven-fold 
chain?" a question which, if not somewhere plausibly 
resolved, could hardly fail, by the indignation which it 
would be apt to raise as against an act of wanton folly, 
to interfere with that degree of sympathy which is 
necessary in any case to an author's purposes. 

2. As furnishing a key to some parts of that tremen- 
dous scenery which afterwards peopled the dreams of 
the opium-eater. 

3. As creating some previous interest of a personal 
sort in the confessing subject, apart from the matter 
of the confessions, which cannot fail to render the 



16 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

confessions themselves more interesting. If a man 
"whose talk is of oxen" should become an opium- 
eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to 
dream at all) he will dream about oxen: whereas, in 
the case before him, the reader will find that the opium- 
eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher ; and accord- 
ingly, that the phantasmagoria of his dreams (waking 
or sleeping, day dreams or night dreams) is suitable to 
one who, in that character, 

Humani nihil a se ahenum putat. 

For amongst the conditions which he deems indis- 
pensable to the sustaining of any claim to the title of 
philosopher, is not merely the possession of a superb 
intellect in its analijtic functions (in which part of the 
pretension, however, England can for some generations 
show but few claimants ; at least, he is not aware of 
any known candidate for this honor who can be styled 
emphatically a subtle thinker, with the exception of 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, in a narrower depart- 
ment of thought, with the recent illustrious exception ^ 

* A third exception might perhaps have been added : and my 
reason for not adding that exception is chiefly because it was only 
in his juvenile efforts that the writer whom I allude to expressly 
addressed himself to philosophical themes ; his riper powers have 
been dedicated (on very excusable and very intelligible grounds, 
under the present direction of the popular mind in England) to 
criticism and the fine arts. This reason apart, however, I doubt 
whether he is not rather to be considered an acute thinker than a 
subtle one. It is, besides, a great drawback on his mastery over 
philosophical subjects, that he has obviously not had the advan- 
tage of a regular scholastic education : he has not read Plato in 
his youth (which most likely was only his misfortune), but 
neither has he read Kant in his manhood (which is his fault). 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 17 

of David Ricardo), — but also on such a constitution 
of the moral facuhies as shall give him an inner eye 
and power of intuition for the vision and mysteries of 
human nature : that constitution of faculties, in short, 
which (amongst all the generations of men that from 
the beginning of time have deployed into life, as it 
were, upon this planet) our English poets have pos- 
sessed in the highest degree — and Scottish^ professors 
in the lowest. 

I have often been asked how I first came to be a 
regular opium-eater ; and have suffered, very unjustly, 
in the opinion of my acquaintance, from being reputed 
to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I 
shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in 
this practice, purely for the sake of creating an artificial 
state of pleasurable excitement. This, however, is a 
misrepresentation of my case. True it is, that for 
nearly ten years 1 did occasionally take opium, for the 
sak^ of the exquisite pleasure it gave me ; but, so long 
as I took it with this view, I was effectually protected 
from all material bad consequences, by the necessity of 
interposing long intervals between the several acts of 
indulgence, in order to renew the pleasurable sensa- 
tions. It was not for the purpose of creating pleasure, 
but of mitigating pain in the severest degree, that 
I first began to use opium as an article of daily diet. 
In the twenty-eighth year of my age, a most painful 
affection of the stomach, which I had first experienced 
about ten years before, attacked me in great strength. 
This affection had originally been caused by the extrem- 

* I disclaim any allusion to existing professors, of whom, 
indeed, I know only one. 

2 



18 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

eties of hunger, suffered in my boyish days. During 
the season of hope and redundant happiness which 
succeeded (that is, from eighteen to twenty-four) it had 
slumbered : for the three following years it had revived 
at intervals ; and now, under favorable circumstances, 
from depression of spirits, it attacked me with violence 
that yielded to no remedies but opium. As the youthful 
sufferings which first produced this derangement of the 
stomach were interesting in themselves and in the 
circumstances that attended them, I shall here briefly 
retrace them. 

My father died when I was about seven years old, 
and left me to the care of four guardians. I was sent 
to various schools, great and small ; and was very early 
distinguished for my classical attainments, especially 
for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek 
with ease ; and at fifteen my command of that language 
was so great, that I not only composed Greek verses in 
lyric metres, but would converse in Greek fluently, and 
without embarrassment — an accomphshment which I 
have not since met with iu any scholar of my times, 
and which, in my case, was owing to the practice of 
daily reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I 
could farmsh extempore ; for the necessity of ransacking 
my memory and invention for all sorts and combinations 
of periphrastic expressions, as equivalents for modern 
ideas, linages, relations of things, &c., gave me a com- 
pass of diction which would never have been called out 
by a dull translation of moral essays, &c. "That 
boy," said one of my masters, pointing the attention of 
a stranger to me, " that boy could harangue an Athenian 
mob better than you or I could address an English 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 19 

one." He who honored me with this eulogy was a 
scholar, "and a ripe and g-ood one," and, of all my 
tutors, was the only one whom I loved or reverenced. 
Unfortunately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, to 
this worthy man's great indignation), I was transferred 
to the care, first of a blockhead, who was in a perpetual 
panic lest I should expose his ignorance ; and, finally, 
to that of a respectable scholar, at the head of a great 
school on an ancient foundation. This man had been 

appointed to his situation by College, Oxford ; and 

was a sound, well-built scholar, but (like most men 
whom I have known from that college) coarse, clumsy, 
and inelegant. A miserable contrast he presented, in 
my eyes, to the Etonian brilliancy of my favorite 
master ; and, besides, he could not disguise from my 
hourly notice the poverty and meagreness of his under- 
standing. It is a bad thing for a boy to be, and know 
himself, far beyond his tutors, whether in knowledge or 
in power of mind. This was the case, so far as 
regarded knowledge at least, not with myself only; for 
the two boys who jointly with myself composed the 
first form w^ere better Grecians than the head-master, 
though not more elegant scholars, nor at all more 
accustomed to sacrifice to the graces. When I first 
entered, I remember that we read Sophocles ; and it 
was a constant matter of triumph to us, the learned 
triumvirate of the first form, to see our "Archididas- 
calus" (as he loved to be called) conning our lesson 
before we went up, and laying a regular train, with 
lexicon and grammar, for blowing up and blasting (as 
it were) any difficulties he found in the choruses; 
whilst we never condescended to open our books, until 



20 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

the moment of going up, and were generally employed 
in writing epigrams upon his wig, or some such import- 
ant matter. My two class-fellows were poor, and 
dependent, for their future prospects at the university, 
on the recommendation of the head-master ; but I, who 
had a small patrimonial property, the income of which 
was sufficient to support me at college, wished to be 
sent thither immediately. I made earnest representa- 
tions on the subject to my guardians, but all to no 
purpose. One, who was more reasonable, and had 
more knowledge of the world than the rest, lived at 
a distance; two of the other three resigned all their 
authority into the hands of the fourth ; and this fourth, 
with whom I had to negotiate, was a worthy man, in his 
way, but haughty, obstinate, and intolerant of all opposi- 
tion to his will. After a certain number of letters and 
personal interviews, I found that I had nothing to hope 
for, not even a compromise of the matter, from my 
guardian : unconditional submission was what he de- 
manded; and I prepared myself, therefore, for other 
measures. Summer was now coming on with hasty 
steps, and my seventeenth birth-day was fast approach- 
ing; after which day I had sworn within myself that 
I would no longer be numbered amongst school-boys. 
Money being what I chiefly wanted, I wrote to a woman 
of high rank, who, though young herself, had known 
me from a child, and had latterly treated me with great 
distinction, requesting that she would " lend " me five 
guineas. For upwards of a week no answer came; 
and I was beginning to despond, when, at length, a 
servant put into my hands a double letter, with a 
coronet on the seal. The letter was kind and obliging; 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 21 

the fair writer was on the sea-coast, and in that way 
the delay had arisen ; she enclosed douhle of what I 
had asked, and good-naturedly hinted, that if I should 
never repay her, it would not absolutely ruin her. Now, 
then, I was prepared for my scheme : ten guineas, 
added to about two that I had remaining from my pocket 
money, seemed to me sufficient for an indefinite length 
of time ; and at that happy age, if no definite boundary 
can be assigned to one's power, the spirit of hope and 
pleasure makes it virtually infinite. 

It is a just remark of Dr. Johnson's (and, what cannot 
often be said of his remarks, it is a very feeling one) 
that we never do anything consciously for the last 
tirne (of things, that is, which we have long been in 
the habit of doing), without sadness of heart. This 

Truth I felt deeply when I came to leave , a place 

which I did not love, and where I had not been happy. 

On the evening before I left forever, I grieved 

when the ancient and lofty school-room resounded with 
the evening service,? performed for the last time in my 
hearing; and at night, when the muster-roll of names 
was called over, and mine (as usual) was called first, 
I stepped forward, and passing the head-master, who 
was standing by, I bowed to him, and looking earnestly 
in his face, thinking to myself, " He is old and infirm, 
and in this world I shall not see him again." I was 
right ; I never did see him again, nor never shall. 
He looked at me complacently, smiled good-naturedly, 
returned my salutation (or rather my valediction), and 
we parted (though he knew it not) forever. I could 
not reverence him intellectually; but he had been 
uniformly kind to me, and had allowed me many indul- 



22 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

gences ; and I grieved at the thought of the mortifica- 
tion I should inflict upon him. 

The morning came, which was to launch me into the 
world, and from which my whole succeeding life has, 
in many important points, taken its coloring. I lodged 
in the head-master's house, and had been allowed, from 
my first entrance, the indulgence of a private room, 
which I used both as a sleeping room and as a study. 
At half after three I rose, and gazed with deep emotion 

at the ancient towers of , " drest in earliest light," 

and beginning to crimson with the radiant lustre of a 
cloudless July morning. I was firm and immovable in 
my purpose, but yet agitated by anticipation of uncer- 
tain danger and troubles ; and if I could have foreseen 
the hurricane, and perfect hail-storm of affliction, which 
soon fell upon me, well might I have been agitated. 
To this agitation the deep peace of the morning pre- 
sented an affecting contrast, and in some degree a 
medicine. The silence was more profound than that 
of midnight: and to me the silence of a summer morn- 
ing is more touching than all other silence, because, the 
light being broad and strong, as that of noon-day at 
other seasons of the year, it seems to differ from per- 
fect day chiefly because man is not yet abroad; and 
thus, the peace of nature, and of the innocent creatures 
of God, seems to be secure and deep, only so long as 
the presence of man, and his restless and unquiet spirit, 
are not there to trouble its sanctity. I dressed myself, 
took my hat and gloves, and lingered a little in the 
room. For the last year and a half this room had been 
my " pensive citadel : " here I had read and studied 
through all the hours of night ; and, though true it was, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 23 

that, for the latter part of this time, I, who was framed 
for love and gentle affections, had lost my gayety and 
happiness, during the strife and fever of contention 
with my guardian, yet, on the other hand, as a boy so 
passionately fond of books, and dedicated to intellectual 
pursuits, I could not fail to have enjoyed many happy 
hours in the midst of general dejection. I wept as I 
looked round on the chair, hearth, writing-table, and 
other familiar objects, knowing too certainly that I 
looked upon them for the last time. Whilst I write 
this, it is eighteen years ago ; and yet, at this moment, I 
see distinctly, as if it were but yesterday, the lineaments 
and expressions of the object on which I fixed my parting 

gaze : it was a picture of the lovely , which hung 

over the mantel-piece; the eyes and mouth of which 
were so beautiful, and the whole countenance so radiant 
with benignity and divine tranquillity, that I had a 
thousand times laid down my pen, or my book, to 
gather consolation from it^ as a devotee from his patron 
saint. Whilst I was yet gazing upon it, the deep tones 

of clock proclaimed that it was four o'clock. I 

went up to the picture, kissed it, and then gently walked 
out, and closed the door forever ! 

^ ^ ^ ^ T? -Tf- 

So blended and intertwisted in this life are occasions 
of laughter and of tears, that I cannot yet recall, without 
smiling, an incident which occurred at that time, and 
which had nearly put a stop to the immediate execution 
of my plan. I -had a trunk of immense weight ; for, 
besides my clothes, it contained nearly all my library. 
The difficulty was to get this removed to a carrier's : 
my room was at an aerial elevation in the house, and 



24 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

(what was worse) the staircase which communicated 
with this angle of the building was accessible only by 
a gallery, which passed the head-master's chamber- 
door. I was a favorite with all the servants; and 
knowing that any of them would screen me, and act 
confidentially, I communicated my embarrassment to a 
groom of the head-master's. The groom swore he 
would do anything I wished; and, when the time 
arrived, went up stairs to bring the trunk down. This 
I feared was beyond the strength of any one man : 
however, the groom was a man 

Of Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear 
The weight of mightiest monarchies ; 

and had a back as spacious as Salisbury Plains. Ac- 
cordingly he persisted in bringing down the trunk 
alone, , whilst I stood waiting at the foot of the last 
flight, in anxiety for the event. For some time I heard 
him descending w^ith slow and firm steps; but, unfor- 
tunately, from his trepidation, as he drew near the 
dangerous quarter, v/ithin a few steps of the gallery, 
his foot slipped; and the mighty burden, falling from 
his shoulders, gained such increase of impetus at each 
step of the descent, that, on reaching the bottom, it 
trundled, or rather leaped, right across, with the noise 
of twenty devils, against the very bed-room door of the 
archididascalus. My first thought was, that all was lost ; 
and that my only chance for executing a retreat was 
to sacrifice my baggage. However, on reflection, I 
determined to abide the issue. The groom was in the 
utmost alarm, both on his own account and on mine : 
but, in spite of this, so irresistibly had the sense of the 
ludicrous, in this unhappy contretems, taken possession 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 25 

of his fancy, that he sang out a long, loud, and canorous 
peal of laughter, that nriight have wakened the Seven 
Sleepers. At the sound of this resonant merriment, 
within the very ears of insulted authority, I could not 
forbear joining in it; subdued to this, not so much by 
the unhappy etourderie of the trunk, as by the effect it 
had upon the groom. We both expected, as a matter 

of course, that Dr. would sally out of his room ; 

for, in general, if but a mouse stirred, he sprang out 
like a mastiff from his kennel. Strange to say, how- 
ever, on this occasion, when the noise of laughter had 
ceased, no sound, or rustling even, was to be heard 

in the bed-room. Dr. had a painful complaint, 

which sometimes keeping him awake, made him sleep, 
perhaps, when it did come, the deeper. Gathering 
courage from the silence, the groom hoisted his burden 
again, and accomplished the remainder of his descent 
without accident. I waited until I saw the trunk placed 
on a wheelbarrow, and on its road to the carrier's : then, 
" with Providence my guide," I set off on foot, carry- 
ing a small parcel, with some articles of dress under 
my arm : a favorite English poet in one pocket ; and a 
small 12mo. volume, containing about nine plays of 
Euripides, in the other. 

It had been ray intention, originally, to proceed to 
Westmoreland, both from the love I bore to that county, 
and on other personal accounts. Accident, however, 
gave a different direction, to my wanderings, and I bent 
my steps towards North Wales. 

After wandering about for some time in Denbigh- 
shire, Merionethshire, and Caernarvonshire, I took 
lodgings in a small neat'house in B . Here I might 



Jib CONFESSIONS OF AN 

have staid with great comfort for many weeks; for 

provisions were cheap at B , from the scarcity of 

other markets for the surplus products of a wide agri- 
cultural district. An accident, however, in which, 
perhaps, no offence was designed, drove me out to 
w^ander again. I know not whether my reader may 
have remarked, but I have often remarked, that the 
proudest class of people in England (or, at any rate, 
the class whose pride is most apparent) are the families 
of bishops. Noblemen, and their children, carry about 
with them, in their very titles, a sufficient notification 
of their rank. Nay, their very names (and this applies 
also to the children of many untitled houses) are often, 
to the English ear, adequate exponents of high birth, or 
descent. Sackville, Manners, Fitzroy, Paulet, Caven- 
dish, and scores of others, tell their own tale. Such 
persons, therefore, find everywhere a due sense of 
their claims already established, except among those 
who are ignorant of the world, by virtue of their own 
obscurity; "Not to know them argues one's self un- 
known." Their manners take a suitable tone and 
coloring; and, for once that they find it necessary to 
impress a sense of their consequence upon others, they 
meet with a thousand occasions for moderating and 
tempering this sense by acts of courteous condescension. 
With the families of bishops it is otherwise ; with them 
it is all up-hill work to make known their pretensions ; 
for the proportion of the episcopal bench taken from 
noble families is not at any time very large ; and the 
succession to these dignities is so rapid, that the public 
ear seldom has time to become familiar with them, 
unless where they are connected with some literary 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 27 

reputation. Hence it is that the children of bishops 
carry about with them an austere and repulsive air, 
indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, — a sort 
of noli vie tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of 
too familiar approach, and shrinking with the sensitive- 
ness of a gouty man, from all contact with the ot nolloi,. 
Doubtless, a powerful understanding, or unusual good- 
ness of nature, will preserve a man from such weakness ; 
but, in general, the truth of my representation will be 
acknowledged ; pride, if not of deeper root in such 
families, appears, at least, more upon the surface of their 
manners. This spirit of manners naturally commiuni- 
cates itself to their domestics, and other dependants. 
Now, my landlady had been a lady's maid, or a nurse, 

in the family of the Bishop of ; and had but lately 

married away and " settled" (as such people express 

it) for life. In a little town like B , merely to have 

lived in the bishop's family conferred some distinction ; 
and my good landlady had rather more than her share 
of the pride I have noticed on that score. What " my 
lord" said, and what "my lord" did, — how useful he 
was in parliament, and how indispensable at Oxford, — 
formed the daily burden of her talk. All this I bore 
very well; for I was too good-natured to laugh in any- 
body's face, and I could make an ample allowance for 
the garrulity of an old servant. Of necessity, however, 
I must iiave appeared in her eyes very inadequately 
impressed with the bishop's importance ; and, perhaps, 
to punish me for my indifference, or, possibly, by ac- 
cident, she one day repeated to me a conversation in 
which I was indirectly a party concerned. She had 
been to the palace to pay her respects to the family; 



28 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

and, dinner being over, was summoned into the dining- 
room. In giving an account of her household economy, 
she happened to mention that she had let her apart- 
ments. Thereupon the good bishop (it seemed) had 
taken occasion to caution her as to her selection of 
inmates; "for," said he, "you. must recollect, Betty, 
that this place is in the high road to the Head ; so that 
multitudes of Irish swindlers, running awa}^ from their 
debts into England, and of English swindlers, running 
away from their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to 
take this place in their route." This advice was cer- 
tainly not without reasonable grounds, but rather fitted 
to be stored up for Mrs. Betty's private meditations, 
than specially reported to me. What followed, how- 
ever, was somewhat worse : — "0, my lord," answered 
my landlady (according to her own representation of 
the matter), "I really don't think this young gentleman 

is a swindler; because ." ^' You. don't think me a 

swindler?" said I, interrupting her, in a tumult of in- 
dignation ; " for the future, I shall spare you the trouble 
of thinking about it." And without delay I prepared 
for my departure. Some concessions the good woman 
seemed disposed to make ; but a harsh and contemptu- 
ous expression, w^hich I fear that I applied to the learned 
dignitary himself, roused her indignation in turn ; and 
reconciliation then became impossible. I was, indeed, 
greatly irritated at the bishop's having suggested any 
grounds of suspicion, however remotely, against a person 
whom he had never seen; and I thought of letting him 
know my mind in Greek; which, at the same time 
that it would furnish some presumption that I w^as no 
swindler, would also (I hoped) compel the bishop to 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 29 

reply in the same language; in which case, I doubted 
not to make it appear, that if I was not so rich as his 
lordship, I was a far better Grecian. Calmer thoughts, 
however, drove this boyish design out of my mind: for 
I considered that the bishop was in the right to counsel 
an old servant; that he could not have designed that 
his advice should be reported to me ; and that the same 
coarseness of mind which had led Mrs. Betty to repeat 
the advice at all might have colored it in a way more 
agreeable to her own style of thinking than to the 
actual expressions of the worthy bishop. 

I left the lodging the very same hour ; and this turned 
out a very unfortunate occurrence for me, because, 
living henceforward at inns, I was drained of my money 
very rapidly. In a fortnight I was reduced to short 
allowance ; that is, I could allow myself only one meal 
a day. From the keen appetite produced by constant 
exercise and mountain air, acting on a youthful stomach, 
I soon began to suffer greatly on this slender regimen ; 
for the single meal which I could venture to order was 
coffee or tea. Even this, however, was at length with- 
drawn ; and, afterwards, so long as I remained in Wales, 
I subsisted either on blackberries, hips, haws, &c., or on 
the casual hospitalities which I now and then received, 
in return for such little services as I had an opportunity 
of rendering. Sometimes I wrote letters of business 
for cottagers who happened to have relatives in Liver- 
pool or in London ; more often I wrote love-letters to 
their sweethearts for young v^romen who had lived as 
servants in Shrewsbury, or other towns on the English 
border. On all such occasions I gave great satisfaction 
to my humble friends, and was generally treated with 



30 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

hospitality ; and once, in particular, near the village of 
Llan-y-styndvvr (or some such name), in a sequestered 
part of Merionethshire, I was entertained for upwards 
of three days by a family of young people, with an 
affectionate and fraternal kindness that left an impres- 
sion upon my heart not yet impaired. The family con- 
sisted, at that time, of four sisters and three brothers, all 
grown up, and remarkable for elegance and delicacy of 
manners. So much beauty, and so much native good 
breeding and refinement, I do not remember to have 
seen before or since in any cottage, except once or 
twice in Westmoreland and Devonshire. They spoke 
English ; an accomplishment not often met with in so 
many members of one family, especially in villages 
remote from the high road. Here I wrote, on my first 
introduction, a letter about prize-money, for one of the 
brothers, who had served on board an English man-of- 
war; and, more privately, two love-letters for two of the 
sisters. They were both interesting looking girls, and 
one of uncommon loveliness. In the midst of their 
confusion and blushes, whilst dictating, or rather giving 
me general instructions, it did not require any great 
penetration to discover that what they wished was that 
their letters should be as kind as was consistent with 
proper maidenly pride. I contrived so to temper my 
expressions as to reconcile the gratification of both 
feelings ; and they were much pleased with the way in 
which I had expressed their thoughts, as (in their sim- 
plicity) they were astonished at my having so readily 
discovered them. The reception one meets with from 
the women of a family generally determines the tenor 
of one's whole entertainment. In this case I had dis- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 31 

charged my confidential duties as secretar}^ so much 
to the general satisfaction, perhaps also amusing them 
with my conversation, that I was pressed to stay with a 
cordiality which I had little inclination to resist. I slept 
with the brothers, the only unoccupied bed standing in 
the apartment of the young women : but in all other 
points they treated me with a respect not usually paid 
to purses as light as mine ; as if my scholarship were 
sufficient evidence that I was of "gentle blood." Thus 
I lived with them for three days, and great part of a 
fourth ; and, from the undiminished kindness which they 
continued to show me, I believe I might have staid with 
them up to this time, if their power had corresponded 
with their wishes. On the last morning, however, I 
perceived upon their countenances, as they sate at 
breakfast, the expression of some unpleasant communi- 
cation whicli was at hand ; and soon after, one of the 
brothers explained to me, that their parents had gone, 
the day before my arrival, to an annual meeting of 
Methodists, held at Caernarvon, and were that day 
expected to return; "and if they should not be so civil 
as they ought to be," he begged, on the part of all the 
young people, that I would not take it amiss. The 
parents returned with churlish faces, and " Dym Sas- 
senach " {710 English) in answer to all my addresses. I 
saw how matters stood ; and so, taking an affectionate 
leave of my kind and interesting young hosts, I went 
my way. For, though they spoke warmly to their 
parents in my behalf, and often excused the manner of 
the old people, by saying that it was " only their way," 
yet I easily understood that my talent for writing love- 
letters would do as little to recommend me with two 



32 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

grave sexagenarian Welsh Methodists as my Greek 
Sapphics or Alcaics; and what had been hospitality, 
when offered to me with the gracious courtesy of my 
young friends, would become charity, when connected 
with the harsh demeanor of these old people. Cer- 
tainly, Mr. Shelley is right in his notions about old 
age ; unless powerfully counteracted by all sorts of 
opposite agencies, it is a miserable corrupter and 
blighter to the genial charities of the human heart. 

Soon after this, I contrived, by means which I must 
omit for want of room, to transfer myself to London. 
And now began the latter and fiercer stage of my long 
sufferings ; without using a disproportionate expression, 
I might say, of my agony. For I now suffered, for 
upwards of sixteen weeks, the physical anguish of 
hunger in various degrees of intensity; but as hitter, 
perhaps, as ever any human being can have suffered 
who has survived it. I would not needlessly harass my 
reader's feelings by a detail of all that I endured ; for 
extremities such as these, under any circumstances of 
heaviest misconduct or guilt, cannot be contemplated, 
even in description, without a rueful pity that is painful 
to the natural goodness of the human heart. Let it 
suffice, at least on this occasion, to say, that a few 
fragments of bread from the breakfast-table of one 
individual (who supposed me to be ill, but did not know 
of my being in utter want), and these at uncertain 
intervals, constituted my whole support. During the 
former part of my sufferings (that is, generally in 
Wales, and always for the first two months in London), 
I was houseless, and very seldom slept under a roof. 
To this constant exposure to the open air I ascribe it, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 33 

mainly, that I did not sink under my torments. Latterly, 
however, when cold and more inclement weather came 
on, and when, from the length of my sufferings, I had 
begun to sink into a more languishing condition, it was, 
no doubt, fortunate for me, that the same person to 
whose breakfast-table I had access allowed me to sleep 
in a large, unoccupied house, of which he was tenant. 
Unoccupied, I call it, for there was no household or 
establishment in it; nor any furniture, indeed, except a 
table and a few chairs. But I found, on taking pos- 
session of my new quarters, that the house already 
contained one single inmate, a poor, friendless child, 
apparently ten years old; but she seemed hunger- 
bitten; and sufTerings of that sort often make children 
look older than they are. From this forlorn child I 
learned, that she had slept and lived there alone, for 
some time before I came ; and great joy the poor crea- 
ture expressed, when she found that I was in future to 
be her companion through the hours of darkness. The 
house was large ; and, from the want of furniture, the 
noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing on the 
spacious staircase and hall ; and, amidst the real fleshly 
ills of cold, and, I fear, hunger, the forsaken child had 
found leisure to sufler still more (it appeared) from the 
self-created one of ghosts. I promised her protection 
against all ghosts whatsoever ; but, alas : I could offer 
her no other assistance. We lay upon the floor, with a 
bundle of cursed law papers for a pillow, but with no 
other co\'ering. than a sort of large horseman's cloak ; 
afterwards, however, we discovered, in a garret, an old 
sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some fragments of 
other articles, which added a little to our warmth. The 
3 



34 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

poor child crept close to me for warmth, and for secu- 
rity against her ghostly enemies. When I was not 
more than usually ill, I took her into my arms, so that, 
in general, she was tolerably warm, and often slept 
when I could not ; for, during the last two months of my 
sufferings, I slept much in the daytime, and was apt to 
fall into transient dozings at all hours. But my sleep 
distressed me more than my watching; for, besides the 
tumultuousness of my dreams (which were only not so 
awful as those which I shall have to describe hereafter 
as produced by opium), my sleep was never more than 
what is called dog-sleep ; so that I could hear myself 
moaning, and was often, as it seemed to me, awakened 
suddenly by my own voice ; and, about this time, a 
hideous sensation began to haunt me as soon as I fell 
into a slumber,, which has since returned upon me, at 
different periods of my life, namely, a sort of twitching 
(I know not where, but apparently about the region of 
the stomach), which compelled me violently to throw out 
my feet for the sake of relieving it. This sensation 
coming on as soon as I began to sleep, and the effort to 
relieve it constantly awaking me, at length I slept only 
from exhaustion; and, from increasing weakness (as I 
said before), I was constantly falling asleep, and con- 
"stantly awaking. Meantime, the master of the house 
sometimes came in upon us suddenly, and very early; 
sometimes not till ten o'clock; sometimes not at all. 
He was in constant fear of bailiffs; improving on the 
plan of Cromwell, every night he slept in a different 
quarter of London ; and I observed that he never failed 
to examine, through a private window, the appearance 
of those who knocked at the door, before he would 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 35 

allow it to be opened. He breakfasted alone ; indeed, 
his tea equipage would hardly have admitted of his 
hazarding an invitation to a second person, any more 
than the quantity of esculent material, which, for the 
most part, was little more than a roll, or a few biscuits, 
which he had bought on his road from the place where 
he had slept. Or, if he had asked a part}^ as I once 
learnedly and facetiously observed to him, the several 
members of it must have stood in the relation to each 
other (not sate m any relation whatever) of succession, 
as the metaphysicians have it, and not of coexistence ; 
in the relation of parts of time, and not of the parts 
of space. During his breakfast, I generally contrived 
a reason for lounging in; and, with an air of as much 
indifference as I could assume, took up such fragments 
as he had left, — sometimes, indeed, there were none 
at all. In doing this, I committed no robbery, except 
upon the man himself, who was thus obliged (I be- 
lieve), now and then, to send out at noon for an extra 
biscuit ; for, as to the poor child, she was never admitted 
into his study (if I may give that name to his chief de- 
pository of parchments, law writings, &c.) ; that room 
was to her the Blue-beard room of the house, beins: 
regularly locked on his departure to dinner, about six 
o'clock, which usually was his final departure for the 
night. Whether this child was an illegitimate daugh- 
ter of Mr. , or only a servant, I could not ascer- 
tain ; she did not herself know ; but certainly she was 
treated altogether as a menial servant. No sooner did 

Mr. make his appearance, than she went below 

stairs, brushed his shoes, coat, &c. ; and, except when 
she was summoned to run an errand, she never emerged 



36 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

from the dismal Tartarus of the kitchens, to the upper 
air, until my welcome knock at night called up her 
little trembling footsteps to the front door. Of her life 
during the daytime, however, I knew little but what 
I gathered from her own account at night ; for, as soon 
as the hours of business commenced, I saw that my 
absence would be acceptable ; and, in general, there- 
fore, I went off and sate in the parks, or elsewhere, 
until night-fall. 

But who, and what, meantime, was the master of the 
house, himself? Reader, he was one of those anoma- 
lous practitioners in lower departments of the law, who, 
— what shall I say? — who, on prudential reasons, or 
from necessity, deny themselves all the indulgence in 
the luxury of too delicate a conscience (a periphrasis 
which might be abridged considerably, but that I leave 
to the reader's taste) ; in many walks of life, a con- 
science is a more expensive incumbrance than a wife 
or a carriage ; and just as people talk of " laying down " 

their carriages, so I suppose my friend, Mr. , had 

" laid down " his conscience for a time ; meaning, doubt- 
less, to resume it as soon as he could afford it. The 
inner economy of such a man's daily life would present 
a most strange picture, if I could allow myself to amuse 
the reader at his expense. Even with my limited 
opportunities for observing what went on, I saw many 
scenes of London intrigues, and complex chicanery, 
"cycle and epicycle, orb in orb," at which I sometimes 
smile to this day, and at which I smiled then, in spite 
of my misery. My situation, however, at that time, 
gave me little experience, in my own person, of any 
qualities in Mr. 's character but such as did him 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 37 

honor; and of his whole strange composition, I must 
forget everything but that towards me he was obliging, 
and, to the extent of his power, generous. 

That power was not, indeed, very extensive. How- 
ever, in common with the rats, I sate rent free ; and as 
Dr. Johnson has recorded that he never but once in his 
life had as much wall-fruit as he could eat, so let me 
be grateful that, on that single occasion, I had as large 
a choice of apartments in a London mansion as I could 
possibly desire. Except the Blue-beard room, which 
the poor child believed to be haunted, all others, from 
the attics to the cellars, were at our service. " The 
world was all before us," and we pitched our tent for 
the night in any spot we chose. This house I have 
already described as a large one. It stands in a con- 
spicuous situation, and in a well-known part of London. 
Many of my readers will have passed it, I doubt not, 
within a few hours of reading this. For myself, I 
never fail to visit it when business draws me to Lon- 
don. About ten o'clock this very night, August 15, 
1821, being my birth-day, I turned aside from my 
evening walk, down Oxford-street, purposely to take a 
glance at it. It is now occupied by a respectable 
family, and, by the lights in the front drawing-room, I 
observed a domestic party, assembled, perhaps, at tea, 
and apparently cheerful and gay; — marvellous contrast, 
in my eyes, to the darkness, cold, silence, and desola- 
tion, of that same house eighteen years ago, when its 
nightly occupants were one famishing scholar and a 
neglected child. Her, by the by, in after years, I vainly 
endeavored to trace. Apart from her situation, she was 
not what would be called an interesting child. She 



38 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

was neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor 
remarkably pleasing in manners. But, thank God ! 
even in those years I needed not the embellishments of 
novel accessories to conciliate my affections. Plain 
human nature, in its humblest and most homely apparel, 
was enough for me ; and I loved the child because she 
was my partner in wretchedness. If she is now living, 
she is probably a mother, with children of her own ; but, 
as I have said, I could never trace her. 

This I regret; but another person there was, at that 
time, whom I have since sought to trace, with far deeper 
earnestness, and w^ith far deeper sorrow at my failure. 
This person was a young woman, and one of that un- 
happy class who subsist upon the wages of prostitution. 
I feel no shame, nor have any reason to feel it, in avow- 
ing, that I was then on familiar and friendly terms with" 
many w^omen in that unfortunate condition. The reader 
needs neither smile at this avowal, nor frown ; for, not 
to remind my classical readers of the old Latin proverb, 
"Sme Cerere,^^ &c., it may well be supposed that in 
the existing state of my purse my connection with 
such women could not have been an impure one. But 
the truth is, that at no time of my life have I been 
a person to hold myself polluted by the touch or ap- 
proach of any creature that wore a human shape. On 
the contrary, from my very earliest youth, it has been 
my pride to converse familiarly, more Socratico, with all 
human beings, — man, woman, and child, — that chance 
might fling in my way : a practice which is friendly to 
the knowledge of human nature, to good feelings, and 
to that frankness of address which becomes a man 
who would be thought a philosopher ; for a philosopher 



ENGLISH OnUM-EATER. 39 

should not see with the eyes of the poor limitary crea- 
ture calling himself a man of the world, and filled 
with narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth and 
education, but should look upon himself as a catholic 
creature, and as standing in an equal relation to high 
and low, to educated and uneducated, to the guilty and 
the innocent. Being m.yself, at that time, of necessity, 
a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets, I naturally 
fell in, more frequently, with those female peripatetics, 
who are technically called street-walkers. Many of 
these women had occasionally taken my part against 
watchmen who wished to drive me off the steps of 
houses where I was sitting. But one amongst them, — 
the one on whose account I have at all introduced this 
subject, — yet no ! let me not class thee, oh noble- 
minded Ann , with that order of women ; — let me 

find, if it be possible, some gentler name to designate 
the condition of her to whose bounty and compassion — 
ministering to my necessities when all the world had 
forsaken me — I owe it that I am at this time alive. 
For many weeks, I had walked, at nights, with this 
poor friendless girl, up and down Oxford-street, or had 
rested with her on steps and under the shelter of porti- 
coes. She could not be so old as myself: she told me, 
indeed, that she had not completed her sixteenth year. 
By such questions as my interest about her prompted, 
I had gradually drawn forth her simple history. Hers 
was a case of ordinary occurrence (as I have since had 
reason to think), and one in which, if London benefi- 
cence had better adapted its arrangements to meet it, 
the power of the law might oftener be interposed to 
protect and to avenge. But the stream of London 



40 CONFESSION! 

charity flows in a channel which, though deep and 
mighty, is yet noiseless and under ground; — not obvi- 
ous or readily accessible to poor, houseless wanderers ; 
and it cannot be denied that the outside air and frame- 
work of London society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive. 
In any case, however, I saw that part of her injuries 
might easily have been redressed ; and I urged her 
often and earnestly to lay her complaint before a magis- 
trate. Friendless as she was, I assured her that she 
would meet with immediate attention ; and that English 
justice, whicli was no respecter of persons, would 
speedily and amply avenge her on the brutal ruffian 
who had plundered her little property. She promised 
me often that she would; but she delayed taking the 
steps I pointed out, from time to time ; for she was timid 
and dejected to a degree which showed how deeply 
sorrow had taken hold of her young heart; and per- 
haps she thought justly that the most upright judge 
and the most righteous tribunals could do nothing to 
repair her heaviest wrongs. Something, however, 
would perhaps have been done; for it had been settled 
between us, at length, — but, unhappily, on the very last 
time but one that I was ever to see her, — that in a day 
or two v;e should speak on her behalf. This little ser- 
vice it was destined, however, that I should never real- 
ize. Meantime, that which she rendered to me, and 
which was greater than I could ever have repaid her, 
was this : — One night, when we were pacing slowly 
along Oxford-street, and afteV a day when I had felt 
unusually ill and faint, I requested her to turn off with 
me into Soho-square. Thither we went; and we sate 
down on the steps of a house, which, to this hour, 



I 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 41 

I never pass without a pang of grief, and an inner act 
of homage to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory 
of the noble act which she there performed. Sud- 
denly, as we sate, I grew much worse. I had been 
leaning my head against her bosom, and all at once I 
sank from her arms and fell backwards on the steps. 
From the sensations I then had, I felt an inner convic- 
tion of the liveliest kind, that without some powerful 
and reviving stimulus I should either have died on the 
spot, or should, at least, have sunk to a point of exhaus- 
tion from which all reiiscent, under my friendless cir- 
cumstances, would soon have become hopeless. Then 
it was, at this crisis of my fate, that my poor orphan 
companion, who had herself met with little but injuries 
in this world, stretched out a saving hand to me. 
Uttering a cry of terror, but without a moment's delay, 
she ran off into Oxford-street, and in less time than 
could be imagined returned to me with a glass of port- 
wine and spices, that acted upon my empty stomach 
(which at that time would have rejected all solid food) 
with an instantaneous power of restoration ; and for 
this glass the generous girl, without a murmur, paid out 
of her own humble purse, at a time, be it remembered, 
when she had scarcely wherewithal to purchase the 
bare necessaries of life, and when she could have no 
reason to expect that I should ever be able to reimburse 
her. 0, youthful benefactress ! how often, in suc- 
ceeding years, standing in solitary places, and thinking 
of thee with grief of heart and perfect love, — how often 
have I wished that, as in ancient times the curse of a 
father was believed to have a supernatural power, and 
to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfil- 



42 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

ment, — even so the benediction of a heart oppressed 
with gratitude might have a like prerogative; might 
have power given to it from above to chase, to haunt, 
to waylay, to overtake, to pursue thee into the central 
darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were possible) 
into the darkness of the grave, there to awaken thee 
with an authentic message of peace and forgiveness, and 
of final reconciliation ! 

I do not often weep ; for not only do my thoughts on 
subjects connected with the chief interests of man daily, 
nay, hourly, descend a thousand fathoms " too deep for 
tears;" not only does the sternness of my habits of 
thought present an antagonism to the feelings which 
prompt tears, — wanting, of necessity, to those who, 
being protected usually by their levity from any tend- 
ency to meditative sorrow, would, by that same levity, 
be made incapable of resisting it on any casual access of 
such feelings ; but also, I believe, that all minds which 
have contemplated such objects as deeply as I have 
done, must, for their own protection from utter despond- 
ency, have early encouraged and cherished some tran- 
quillizing belief as to the future balances and the 
hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings. On these 
accounts I am cheerful to this hour; and, as I have 
said, I do not often weep. Yet some feelings, though 
not deeper or more passionate, are more tender than 
others ; and often, when I walk, at this time, in Oxford- 
street, by dreamy lamp-light, and hear those airs 
played on a barrel-organ which years ago solaced me 
and my dear companion (as I must always call her), 
I shed tears, and muse with myself at the mysterious 
dispensation which so suddenly and so critically sepa- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 43 

rated us forever. How it happened, the reader will 
understand from what remains of this introductory 
narration. 

Soon after the period of the last incident I have 
recorded, I met, in Albemarle-street, a gentleman of 
his late Majesty's household. This gentleman had 
received hospitalities, on different occasions, from my 
family ; and he challenged me upon the strength of 
my family likeness. I did not attempt any disguise ; 
1 answered his questions ingenuously, and, on his 
pledging his word of honor that he would not betray 
me to my guardians, I gave him an address to my 
friend, the attorney. The next day I received from 
him a ten-pound bank note. The letter enclosing it was 
delivered, with other letters of business, to the attorney ; 
but, though his look and manner informed me that he 
suspected its contents, he gave it up to me honorably, 
and without demur. 

This present, from the particular service to which it 
was applied, leads me naturally to speak of the purpose 
which had allured me up to London, and which I had 
been (to use a forensic word) solkiting from the first 
day of my arrival in London, to that of my final de- 
parture. 

In so mighty a world as London, it will surprise my 
readers that I should not have found some means of 
staving off the last extremities of penury ; and it will 
strike them that two resources, at least, must have been 
open to me, namely, either to seek assistance from the 
friends of my family, or to turn my youthful talents 
and attainments into some channel of pecuniary emolu- 
ment. As to the first course, I may observe, generally. 



44 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

that what I dreaded beyond all other evils was the 
chance of being reclaimed by my guardians ; not 
doubting that whatever power the law gave them 
would have been enforced against me to the utmost ; 
that is, to the extremity of forcibly restoring me to the 
school which I had quitted; a restoration which, as it 
would, in my eyes, have been a dishonor, even if sub- 
mitted to voluntarily, could not fail, when extorted from 
me in contempt and defiance of my own wishes and 
efforts, to have been a humiliation worse to me than 
death, and which would indeed have terminated in 
death. I was, therefore, shy enough of applying for 
assistance even in those quarters where I was sure of 
receiving it, at the risk of furnishing my guardians with 
any clue for recovering me. But, as to London in par- 
ticular, though doubtless my father had in his lifetime 
had many friends there, yet (as ten years had passed 
since his death) I remembered few of them even by 
name ; and never having seen London before, except 
once for a few hours, I knew not the address of even 
those few. To this mode of gaining help, therefore, 
in part the difficulty, but much more the paramount 
fear which I have mentioned, habitually indisposed me. 
In regard to the other mode, I now feel half inclined to 
join my reader in wondering that I should have over- 
looked it. As a corrector of Greek proofs (if in no other 
way), I might, doubtless, have gained enough for my 
slender wants. Such an office as this I could have 
discharged with an exemplary and punctual accuracy 
that would soon have gained me the confidence of my 
employers. But it must not be forgotten that, even for 
such an office as this, it was necessary that I should 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 45 

first of all have an introduction to some respectable 
publisher; and this I had no means of obtaining. To 
say the truth, however, it had never once occurred to 
me to think of literary labors as a source of profit. No 
mode sufficiently speedy of obtaining money had ever 
occurred to me, but that of borrowing it on the strength 
of my future claims and expectations. This mode I 
sought byevery avenue to compass; and amongst other 
persons I applied to a Jew named D— . =^ 



* To this same Jew, by the way, some eighteen months after- 
wards, I applied again on the same business ; and, dating at that 
time from a respectable college, I was fortunate enough to gain his 
serious attention to my proposals. My necessities had not arisen 
from any extravagance, or youthful levities (these, my habits and 
the nature of my pleasures raised me far above), but simply from 
the vindictive malice of my guardian, who, when he found himself 
no longer able to prevent me from going to the university, had, as 
a parting token of his good nature, refused to sign an order for 
granting me a shilling beyond the allowance made to me at school, 
namely, one hundred pounds per annum. Upon this sum, it was, in 
my lime, barely possible to have lived in college ; and not possible 
to a man, who, though above the paltry affectation of ostentatious 
disregard for money, and without any expensive tastes, confided, 
nevertheless, rather too much in servants, and did not delight in 
the petty details of minute economy. I soon, therefore, became 
embarrassed ; and, at length, after a most voluminous negotiation 
with the Jew (some parts of Avhich, if I had leisure to rehearse 
them, would greatly amuse my readers), I was put in possession 
of the sum I asked for, on the " regular " terms of paying the Jew 
seventeen and a half per cent, by way of annuity on all the money 
furnished ; Israel, on his part, graciously resuming no more than 
about ninety guineas of the said money, on account of an attorney's 
bill (for what services, to whom rendered, and when, — whether at 
the siege of Jerusalem, at the building of the Second Temple, or 
on some earlier occasion, — I have not yet been able to discover). 
How many perches this bill measured I really forget ; but I still 
keep it in a cabinet of natural curiosities, and some time or other 
I believe I shall present it to the British Museum. 



46 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

To this Jew, and to other advertising money-lenders 
(some of whom were, I believe, also Jews), I had intro- 
duced myself, with an account of my expectations ; 
which account, on examining my father's will at Doc- 
tor's Commons, they had ascertained to be correct. 

The person there mentioned as the second son of 

was found to have all the claims (or more than all) that 
I had stated : but one question still remained, ^vhich the 
faces of the Jews pretty significantly suggested, — was 
I that person ? This doubt had never occurred to me 
as a possible one ; I had rather feared, whenever my 
Jewish friends scrutinized me keenly, that I might be 
too well known to be that person, and that some 
scheme might be passing in their minds for entrapping 
me and selling me to my guardians. It was strange to 
me to find my own self, materialiter considered (so I 
expressed it, for I doted on logical accuracy of dis- 
tinctions), accused, or at least suspected, of counterfeit- 
ing my own self, formaliter considered. However, to 
satisfy their scruples, I took the only course in my 
power. Whilst I was in Wales, I had received various 
letters from young friends : these I produced, — for I 
carried them constantly in my pocket, — being, indeed, 
by this time, almost the only relics of my personal in- 
cumbrances (excepting the clothes I wore), which I had 
not in one way or other disposed of. Most of these let- 
ters were from the Earl of , who was, at that time, 

my chief (or rather only) confidential friend. These 
letters were dated fi*om Eton. I had also some from 

the Marquis of , his father, who, though absorbed 

in agricultural pursuits, yet having been an Etonian 
himself, and as good a scholar as a nobleman needs 
to be, still retained an affection for classical studies, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 47 

and for youthful scholars. He had, accordingly, from 
the time that I was fifteen, corresponded with me ; 
sometimes upon the great improvements which he had 

made, or was meditating, in the counties of M and 

SI , since I had been there ; sometimes upon the 

merits of a Latin poet ; at other times, suggesting sub- 
jects to me on which he wished me to write verses. 

On reading the letters, one of my Jewish friends 
agreed to furnish two or three hundred pounds on my 
personal security, provided I could persuade the young 
earl, — who was, by the way, not older than m}- self, — to 
guarantee the payment on our coming of age : the 
Jew's final object being, as I now suppose, not the 
trifling profit he could expect to make by me, but the 
prospect of establishing a connection with my noble 
friend, whose immense expectations were well known 
to him. In pursuance to this proposal on the part of the 
Jew, about eight or nine days after I had received the 
ten pounds, I prepared to go down to Eton. Nearly three 
pounds of the money I had given to my money-lending 
friend, on his alleging that the stamps must be bought, in 
order that the writings might be prepared whilst I was 
away from London. I thought in my heart that he was 
lying; but I did not wish to give him any excuse for 
charging his own delays upon me. A smaller sum I had 
given to my friend the attorney (who was connected with 
the money-lenders as their lawyer), to which, indeed, 
he was entitled for his unfurnished lodgings. About 
fifteen shillings I had employed in reestablishing 
(though in a very humble way) my dress. Of the re- 
mainder, I gaver one-quarter to Ann, meaning, on my 
return, to have divided with her whatever might remain. 



48 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

These arrangements made, soon after six o'clock, on 
a dark winter evening, I set off, accompanied by Ann, 
towards Piccadilly; for it was my intention to go down 
as far as Salt Hill on the Bath or Bristol mail. Oar 
course lay through a part of the town which has now 
all disappeared, so that I can no longer retrace its 
ancient boundaries : Swallow-street, I think it was 
called. Having time enough before us, however, we 
bore away to the left, until we came into Golden- 
square : there, near the corner of Sherrard-street, we 
sat down, not wishing to part in the tumult and blaze 
of Piccadilly. I had told her of my plans some time 
before ; and now I assured her again that she should 
share in my good fortune, if I met with any ; and that 
I would never forsake her, as soon as I had power to 
protect her. This I fully intended, as much from incli- 
nation as from a sense of duty ; for, setting aside grati- 
tude, which, in any case, must have made me her debtor 
for life, I loved her as affectionately as if she had been 
my sister ; and at this moment with seven-fold tender- 
ness, from pity at witnessing her extreme dejection. I 
had, apparently, most reason for dejection, because I 
was leaving the savior of my life; yet I, considering 
the shock my health had received, was cheerful and 
full of hope. She, on the contrary, who was parting 
with one who had had little means of serving her, ex- 
cept by kindness and brotherly treatment, was overcome 
by sorrow; so that, when I kissed her at our final 
farewell, she put her arms about my neck, and wept, 
without speaking a word. I hoped to return in a week 
at furthest, and I agreed with her that on the fifth night 
from that, and every night afterwards, she should wait 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 49 

for me, at six o'clock, near the bottom of Great Titch- 
iield-street, which had been our customary haven, as it 
were, of rendezvous, to prevent our missing each other 
in the great Mediterranean of Oxford-street. This, 
and other measures of precaution, I took : one, only, I 
forgot. She had either never told me, or (as a matter 
of no great interest) I had forgotten, her surname. It 
is a general practice, indeed, with girls of humble rank 
in her (^nhappy condition, not (as novel-reading women 
of higher pretensions) to style themselves Miss Doug' 
lass, Miss Montague, &c., but simply by their Chris- 
tian names, Mary, Jane, Frances, &c. Her surname, 
as the surest means of tracing her, I ought now to have 
inquired; but the truth is, having no reason to think 
that our meeting could, in consequence of a short inter- 
ruption, be more difficult or uncertain than it had 
been for so many weeks, I had scarcely for a moment 
adverted to it as necessary, or placed it amongst my 
memoranda against this parting interview; and my 
final anxieties being spent in comforting her with hopes, 
and in pressing upon her the necessity of getting some 
medicine for a violent cough and hoarseness with which 
she was troubled, I wholly forgot it until it was too late 
to recall her. 

It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Glouces- 
ter Coffee-House, and the Bristol Mail being on the 
point of going ofT, I mounted on the outside. The fine 
fluent motion ^^ of this mail soon laid me asleep. It is 
somewhat remarkable that the first easy or refreshing 



* The Bristol Mail is the best appointed in the kingdom, owing 
to the double advantage of an unusually good road, and of an extra 
sum for expenses subscribed by the Bristol merchants. 

4 



50 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

sleep which I had enjoyed for some months was on the 
outside of a mail-coach, — a bed which, at this day, I 
find rather an uneasy one. Connected with this sleep 
was a little incident which served, as hundreds of others 
did at that time, to convince me how easily a man, 
who has never been in any great distress, may pass 
through life without knowing, in his own person, at 
least, anything of the possible goodness of the human 
heart, or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possi^e vile- 
ness. So thick a curtain of manners is drawn over the 
features and expression of men's natures, that, to the 
ordinary observer, the two extremities, and the infinite 
field of varieties which lie between them, are all con- 
founded, — the vast and multitudinous compass of their 
several harmonies reduced to the meagre outline of 
differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of ele- 
mentary sounds. The case was this : for the first four 
or five miles from London, I annoyed my fellows-pas- 
senger on the roof, by occasionally falling against him 
when the coach gave a lurch to his side ; and, indeed, 
if the road had been less smooth and level than it is, I 
should have fallen off, from weakness. Of this annoy- 
ance he complained heavily, as, perhaps, in the same 
circumstances, most people would. He expressed his 
complaint, however, more morosely than the occasion 
seemed to warrant; and if I had parted with him at 
that moment, I should have ■ thought of him (if I had 
considered it worth while to think of him at all) as a 
surly and almost brutal fellow. However, I was con- 
scious that I had given him some cause for complaint, 
and, therefore, I apologized to him, and assured him I 
would do what I could to avoid falling asleep for the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 51 

future ; and at the same time, in as few words as pos- 
sible, I explained to him that I was ill, and in a weak 
state from long suffering, and that I could not afford, at 
that time, to take an inside place. The man's manner 
changed, upon hearing this explanation, in an instant; 
and when I next woke for a minute, from the noise and 
lights of Hounslow (for, in spite of my wishes and 
efforts, I had fallen asleep again within two minutes 
from the time I had spoken to him), I found that he had 
put his arm round me to protect me from faUing off; 
and for the rest of my journey he behaved to me with 
the gentleness of a woman, so that, at length, I almost 
lay in his arms ; and this was the more kind, as he 
could not have known that I was not going the whole 
way to Bath or Bristol. Unfortunately, indeed, I did 
go rather further than I intended ; for so genial and 
refreshing was my sleep, that the next time, after leav- 
ing Hounslow, that I fully awoke, was upon the sudden 
pulling up of the mail (possibly at a post-office), and, 
on inquiry, I found that we had reached Maidenhead, 
six or seven miles, I think, ahead of Salt Hill. Here I 
alighted ; and for the half-minute that the mail stopped, 
I was entreated by my friendly companion (who, from 
the transient glimpse I had of him in Piccadilly, 
seemed to me to be a gentleman's butler, or person 
of that rank), to go to bed without delay. This I prom- 
ised, though with no intention of doing so ; and, in fact, 
I immediately set forward, or, rather, backward, on 
foot. It must then have been nearly midnight; but so 
slowly did I creep along, that I heard a clock in a 
cottage strike four before I turned down the lane from 
Slough to Eton. The air and the sleep had both 



52 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

refreshed me ; but I was weary, nevertheless. I remem- 
ber a thought (obvious enough, and which has been 
prettily expressed by a Roman poet) which gave me 
some consolation, at that moment, under my poverty. 
There had been, some time before, a murder committed 
on or near Hounslow Heath. I think I cannot be mis- 
taken when I say that the name of the murdered person 
was Steele, and that he was the owner of a lavender 
plantation in that neighborhood. Every step of my 
progress was bringing me nearer to the heath ; and it 
naturally occurred to me that I and the accursed mur- 
derer, if he were that night abroad, might, at every 
instant, be unconsciously approaching each other 
through the darkness ; in which case, said I, supposing 
I — instead of being (as, indeed, I am) little better than 
an outcast, 

Lord of my learning, and no land beside — 

were, like my friend Lord , heir, by general re- 
pute, to £ 70,000 per annum, what a panic should I be 
under, at this moment, about my throat ! Indeed, it 

was not likely that Lord should ever be in my 

situation ; but, nevertheless, the spirit of the remark 
remains true, that vast power and possessions make a 
man shamefully afraid of dying; and I am convinced 
that many of the most intrepid adventurers, who, by 
fortunately being poor, enjoy the full use of their natural 
courage, would, if, at the very instant of going into 
action, news were brought to them that they had unex- 
pectedly succeeded to an estate in England of £50,000 
a year, feel their dislike to bullets considerably sharp- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 53 

ened,^ and their efforts at perfect equanimity and self- 
possession proportionably difficult. So true it is, in the 
language of a wise man, whose own experience had 
made him acquainted with both fortunes, that riches are 
better fitted 

To slacken virtue, and abate her edge, 

Than lempt her to do aught may merit praise. 

Paradise Regained. 

I dally with my subject, because, to myself, the 
remembrance of these times is profoundly interesting. 
But my reader shall not have any further cause to 
complain; for I now hasten to its close. In the road 
between Slough and Eton I fell asleep; and, just as 
the morning began to dawn, I was awakened by the 
voice of a man standing over me and surveying me. 
I know not what he was. He was an ill-looking fellow, 
but not, therefore, of necessity, an ill-meaning fellow; 
or, if he were, I suppose he thought that no person 
sleeping out-of-doors in winter could be worth robbing. 
In which conclusion, however, as it regarded myself, I 
beg to assure him, if he should be among my readers, 
that he was mistaken. After a slight remark, he passed 
on. I was not sorry at his disturbance, as it enabled me 
to pass through Eton before people were generally up. 
The night had been heavy and lowering, but towards 
the morning it had changed to a slight frost, and the 
ground and the trees were now covered with rime. I 

* It will be objected that many men, of the highest rank and 
wealth, have, in our own day, as well as throughout our history, 
been amongst the foremost in courting danger in battle. True ; 
but this is not the case supposed. Long familiarity with power 
has, to them, deadened its effect and its attractions. 



54 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

slipped through Eton unobserved; washed myself, and, 
as far as possible, adjusted my dress, at a little public 
house in Windsor; and, about eight o'clock, went down 
towards Pote's. On my road I met some junior boys, 
of whom I made inquiries. An Etonian is always a 
gentleman, and, in spite of my shabby habiliments, they 

answered me civilly. My friend. Lord , was gone 

to the University of . "Ibi omnis efTusus labor!" 

I had, however, other friends at Eton; but it is not 
to all who wear that name in prosperity that a man is 
willing to present himself in distress. On recollecting 

myself, however, I asked for the Earl of D , to 

whom (though my acquaintance with him was not so 
intimate as with some others) I should not have shrunk 
from presenting myself under any circumstances. He 
was still at Eton, though, I believe, on the wing for 
Cambridge. I called, was received kindly, and asked to 
breakfast. 

Here let me stop, for a moment, to check my reader 
from any erroneous conclusions. Because I have had 
occasion incidentally to speak of various patrician 
friends, it must not be supposed that I have myself any 
pretensions to rank or high blood. I thank God that I 
have not. I am the son of a plain English merchant, 
esteemed, during his life, for his great integrity, and 
strongly attached to literary pursuits (indeed, he was 
himself, anonymously, an author). If he had lived, it 
was expected that he would hav^e been very rich ; but, 
dying prematurely, he left no more than about £30,000 
amongst seven different claimants. My mother I may 
mention with honor, as still more highly gifted ; for, 
though unpretending to the name and honors of a lite- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 55 

rary woman, I shall presume to call her (what many 
literary women are not) an intellectual woman ; and I 
believe that if ever her letters should be collected and 
published, they would be thought generally to exhibit 
as much strong and masculine sense, delivered in as 
pure " mother English," racy and fresh with idiomatic 
graces, as any in our language, — hardly excepting those 
of Lady M. W. Montague. These are my honors of 
descent; I have no others; and I have thanked God 
sincerely that I have not, because, in my judgment, a 
station which raises a man too eminently above the 
level of his fellow-creatures, is not the most favorable 
to moral or to intellectual qualities. 

Lord D placed before me a most magnificent 

breakfast. It was really so; but in my eyes it seemed 
trebly magnificent, from being the first regular meal, the 
first "good man's table," that I had sat down to for months. 
Strange to say, however, I could scarcely eat anything. 
On the day when I first received my ten-pound bank- 
note, I had gone to a baker's shop and bought a couple 
of rolls; this very shop I had two months or six weeks 
before surveyed with an eagerness of desire which it 
was almost humiliating to me to recollect. I remem- 
bered the story about Otway; and feared that there 
might be clanger in eating too rapidly. But I had no 
need for alarm ; my appetite was quite sunk, and I 
became sick before I had eaten half of what I had 
bought. This effect, from eating what approached to a 
meal, I continued to feel for weeks ; or, when I did not 
experience any nausea, part of w^hat I ate was rejected, 
sometimes with' acidity, sometimes immediately and 
without any acidity. On the present occasion, at Lord 



56 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

D 's table, 1 found myself not at all better than 

usual ; and, in the midst of luxuries, I had no appetite. 
I had, however, unfortunately, at all times a craving 
for wine ; I explained my situation, therefore, to Lord 
D , and gave him a short account of my late suf- 
ferings, at which he expressed great compassion, and 
called for wine. This gave me a momentary relief 
and pleasure; and on all occasions, when I had an 
opportunity, I never failed to drink wine, which 1 
worshipped then as I have since worshipped opium. 
I am convinced, however, that this indulgence in wine 
continued to strengthen my malady, for the tone of 
my stomach was apparently quite sunk ; but, by a better 
regimen, it might sooner, and, perhaps, effectually, have 
been revived. I hope that it was not from this love of 
wine that I lingered in the neighborhood of my Eton 
friends ; I persuaded myself then that it was from re- 
luctance to ask of Lord D , on whom I was con- 
scious I had not sufHcient claims, the particular service 
in quest of which I had come to Eton. I was, however, 
unwilling to lose my journey, and, — I asked it. Lord 

D , whose good nature was unbounded, and which, 

in regard to myself, had been measured rather by his 
compassion perhaps for my condition, and his knowl- 
edge of my intimacy with some of his relatives, than 
by an over-rigorous inquiry into the extent of my own 
direct claims, faltered, nevertheless, at this request. He 
acknowledged that he did not like to have any dealings 
with money-lenders, and feared lest such a transaction 
might come to the ears of his connections. Moreover, 
he doubted whether his signature, whose expectations 
were so much more bounded than those of , would 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 57 

avail with my unchristian friends. However, he did 
not wish, as it seemed, to mortify me by an absokite 
refusal; for, after a little consideration, he promised, 
under certain conditions, which he pointed out, to gi\'e 

his security. Lord D was at this time not eighteen 

years of age ; but I have often doubted, on recollecting, 
since, the good sense and prudence which on this occa- 
sion he mingled with so much urbanity of manner (an 
urbanity which in him wore the grace of youthful sin- 
cerity), whether any statesman — the oldest and the 
most accomplished in diplomacy — could have ac- 
quitted himself better under the same circumstances. 
Most people, indeed, cannot be addressed on such a 
business, without surveying you with looks as austere 
and unpropitious as those of a Saracen's head. 

Eecomforted by this promise, which was not quite 
equal to the best, but far above the worst, that I had 
pictured to myself as possible, I returned in a Windsor 
coach to London three days after I had quitted it. And 
now I come to the end of my story. The Jews did not 

approve of Lord D 's terms; whether they would 

in the end have acceded to them, and were only seek- 
ing time for making due inquiries, I know not; but 
many delays were made, — time passed on, — the small 
fragment of my bank-note had just melted away, and 
before any conclusion could have been put to the busi- 
ness, I must have relapsed into my former state of 
wretchedness. Suddenly, however, at this crisis, an 
opening was m.ade, almost by accident, for reconcilia- 
tion with my friends. I quitted London in haste, for a 
remote part of -England; after some time, I proceeded 
to the university; and it was not until many months 



58 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

had passed away, that I had it in my power again to 
revisit the ground which had become so interesting to 
me, and to this day remains so, as the chief scene of 
my youthful sufferings. 

Meantime, what had become of poor Ann ? For her 
I have reserved my concluding words; according to our 
agreement, I sought her daily, and waited for her every 
night, so long as I stayed in London, at the corner of 
Titchfield-street. I inquired for her of every one who 
was likely to know her; and during the last hours of 
my stay in London, I put into activity every means of 
tracing her that my knowledge of London suggested, 
and the limited extent of my power made possible. 
The street where she had lodged I knew, but not the 
house ; and I remembered, at last, some account w^hich 
she had given of ill treatment from her landlord, which 
made it probable that she had quitted those lodgings 
before we parted. She had few acquaintance; most 
people, besides, thought that the earnestness of my 
inquiries arose from motives which moved their laugh- 
ter or their slight regard ; and others, thinking that 1 
was in chase of a girl who had robbed me of some 
trifles, were naturally and excusably indisposed to give 
me any clue to her, if, indeed, they had any to give. 
Finally, as my despairing resource, on the day I left 
London, I put into the hands of the only person who (I 
was sure) must know Ann by sight, from having been 

in company with us once or twice, an address to 

in shire, at that time the residence of my family. 

But, to this hour, I have never heard a syllable about 
her. This, amongst such troubles as most men meet 
with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction. If 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 59 

she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in 
search of each other, at the very same moment, through 
the mighty labyrinths of London ; perhaps even within 
a few feet of each other, — a barrier no wider, in a Lon- 
don street, often amounting in the end to a separation 
for eternity ! During some years, I hoped that she did 
live ; and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical 
use of the word myriad^ I may say, that on my different 
visits to London, I have looked into many, many myriads 
of female faces, in the hope of meeting her. I should 
know her again amongst a thousand, if I saw her for a 
moment; for, though not handsome, she had a sweet 
expression of countenance, and a peculiar and graceful 
carriage of the head. I sought her, I have said, in 
hope. So it was for years ; but now I should fear to 
see her; and her cough, which grieved me when 1 
parted with her, is now my consolation. I now wish to 
see her no longer, but think of her, more gladly, as one 
long since laid in the grave; — in the grave, I would 
hope, of a Magdalen ; — taken away, before injuries 
and cruelty had blotted out and transfigured her ingen- 
uous nature, or the brutalities of ruffians had completed 
the ruin they had begun. 

So then, Oxford-street, stony-hearted stepmother, 
thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest 
the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from 
thee I — the time was come, at last, that I no more should 
pace in anguish thy never-ending terraces ; no more 
should dream, and wake in captivity to the pangs of 
hunger. Successors, too many, to myself and Ann, 
have, doubtless, since then trodden in our footsteps; 
inheritors of our calamities; other orphans than Ann 



60 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

have sighed ; tears have been shed by other children ; 
and thou, Oxford-street, hast since echoed to the groans 
of innumerable hearts. For myself, however, the storm 
which I had outlived seemed to have been the pledge 
of a long fair weather; the premature sufferings which 
I had paid down, to have been accepted as a ransom for 
many years to come, as a price of long immunity from 
sorrow; and if again I walked in London, a solitary 
and contemplative man (as oftentimes I did), I walked 
for the most part in serenity and peace of mind. And, 
although it is true that the calamities of my novitiate in 
London had struck root so deeply in my bodily con- 
stitution that afterwards they shot up and flourished 
afresh, and grew into a noxious umbrage that has 
overshadow^ed and darkened my latter years, yet these 
second assaults of suffering were met with a fortitude 
more confirmed, with the resources of a maturer intel- 
lect, and with alleviations from sympathizing aflection, 
how deep and tender ! 

Thus, however, with whatsoever alleviations, years 
that were far asunder were bound together by subtile 
links of suffering derived from a common root. And 
herein I notice an instance of the short-sightedness of 
human desires, — that oftentimes, on moonlight nights, 
during my first mournful abode in London, my consola- 
tion was (if such it could be thought) to gaze from Ox- 
ford-street up every avenue in succession which pierces 
through the heart of Mary-le-bone to the fields and the 
woods ; for that, said I, travelling with my eyes up the 
long vistas which lay part in light and part in shade, 

''that is the road to the north, and, therefore, to ; 

and if I had the wings of a dove, that way I would fly 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 61 

for comfort." Thus I said, and thus I wished in my 
blindness ; yet, even in that very northern region it was, 
in that very valley, nay, in that very house to which 
my erroneous wishes pointed, that this second birth of 
my sufferings began, and that they again threatened to 
besiege the citadel of life and hope. There it was that 
for years I was persecuted by visions as ugly, and as 
ghastly phantoms, as ever haunted the couch of an 
Orestes ; and in this unhappier than he, — that sleep, 
which comes to all as a respite and a restoration, and 
to him especially as a blessed balm for his wounded 
heart and his haunted brain, visited me as my bitterest 
scourge. Thus blind was I in my desires; yet, if a 
veil interposes between the dim-sightedness of man 
and his future calamities, the same vale hides from 
him their alleviations ; and a grief which had not been 
feared is met by consolations which had not been 
hoped. I, therefore, who participated, as it were, in 
the troubles of Orestes (excepting only in his agitated 
conscience), participated no less in all his supports ; 
my Eumenides, like his, were at my bed-feet, and 
stared in upon me through the curtains; but, watching 
by my pillow, or defrauding herself of sleep to bear me 
company through the heavy watches of the night, sat 
my Electra ; for thou, beloved M., dear companion of 
my later years, thou wast my Electra ! and neither in 
nobility of mind nor in long-suffering affection wouldst 
permit that a Grecian sister should excel an English 
wife. For thou thoughtest not much to stoop to humble 
offices of kindness, and to servile ministrations of ten- 
derest affection; to wipe away for years the unwhole- 
some dews upon the forehead, or to refresh the lips 



62 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

when parched and baked with fever ; nor even when 
thy own peaceful slumbers had by long sympathy be- 
come infected with the spectacle of my dread contest 
with phantoms and shadowy enemies, that oftentimes 
bade me "sleep no more!" — not even then didst 
thou utter a complaint or any murmur, nor withdraw 
thy angelic smiles, nor shrink from thy service of love, 
more than Electra did of old. For she, too, though she 
was a Grecian woman, and the daughter of the king^ 
of men, yet wept sometimes, and hid her face t in her 
robe. 

But these troubles are past, and thou wilt read these 
records of a period so dolorous to us both as the 
legend of some hideous dream that can return no more. 
Meantime I am again hi London ; and again I pace the 
terraces of Oxford-street by night; and oftentimes, — 
when I am oppressed by anxieties that demand all my 
philosophy and the comfort of thy presence to support, 
and yet remember that I am separated from thee by 
three hundred miles, and the length of three dreary 
months, — I look up the streets that run northward 
from Oxford-street, upon moonlight nights, and recol- 
lect my youthful ejaculation of anguish; and remem- 

* Agamemnon. 

+ Ouiiu Ssig figo ttbtiiov. The scholar will know that through- 
out this passage I refer to the early scenes of the Orestes, — one of 
the most beautiful exhibitions of the domestic affections which 
even the dramas of Euripides can furnish. To the English reader, 
it maybe necessary to say, that the situation at th« opening of the 
drama is that of a brother attended only by his sister during the 
demoniacal possession of a suffering conscience (or, in the mythol- 
ogy of the play, haunted by the furies), and in circumstances of 
immediate danger from enemies, and of desertion or cold regard 
from nominal friends. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 63 

bering that thou art sitting alone in that same valley, 
and mistress of that very house to which my heart 
turned in its blindness nineteen years ago, I think that, 
though blind indeed, and scattered to the winds of late, 
the promptings of my heart may yet have had refer- 
ence to a remoter time, and may be justified if read 
in another meaning; and if I could allow myself to 
descend again to the impotent wishes of childhood, I 
should again say to myself, as I look to the north, " O 
that I had the wings of a dove!" and with how just 
a confidence in thy good and gracious nature might I 
add the other half of my early ejaculation, — "And 
that way I would fly for comfort ! " 



THE PLEASUKES OF OPIUM. 



It is so long since I first took opium, that if it had 
been a trifling incident in my life, 1 might have forgot- 
ten its date : but cardinal events are not to be forgotten ; 
and, from circumstances connected with it, I remember 
that it must be referred to the autumn of 1804. Dur- 
ing that season I was in London, having come thither 
for the first time since my entrance at college. And 
my introduction to opium arose in the following way : 
From an early age I had been accustomed to wash my 
head in cold water at least once a day ; being suddenly 
seized with tooth-ache, I attributed it to some relaxation 
caused by an accidental intermission of that practice ; 
jumped out of bed, plunged my head into a basin of 
cold water, and, with hair thus wetted, went to 
sleep. The next morning, as I need hardly say, I 
awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head 
and face, from which I had hardly any respite for 
about twenty days. On the twenty-first day I think it 
was, and on a Sunday, that I went out into the streets; 
rather to run away, if possible, from my torments, than 
with any distinct purpose. By accident, I met a college 
acquaintance, who recommended opium. Opium ! dread 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 65 

agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain ! I bad beard 
of it as I bad beard of manna or of ambrosia, but no 
further; bow unmeaning a sound was it at tbat time! 
what solemn cbords does it now strike upon my heart ! 
what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remem- 
brances ! Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a 
mystic importance attached to the minutest circum- 
stances connected with the place, and the time, and the 
man (if man be was), tbat first laid open to me the para- 
dise of opium-eaters. It was a Sunday afternoon, wet 
and cheerless ; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours 
has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London. My 
road homewards lay througb Oxford-street; and near 
"the stately Funtheon^^ (as Mr. Wordsworth has oblig- 
ingly called it) I saw a druggist's shop. The drug- 
gist (unconscious minister of celestial pleasures!), as 
if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and 
stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected 
to look on a Sunday; and when I asked for the tinc- 
ture of opium, be gave it to me as any other man 
might do ; and, furthermore, out of my shilling returned 
to me what seemed to be a real copper half-penny, taken 
out of a real wooden drawer. Nevertheless, in spite 
of such indications of humanity, be has ever since 
existed in my mind as a beatific vision of an immor- 
tal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission 
to myself. And it confirms me ill this way of con- 
sidering him, that wbe.n I next came up to London, I 
sought him near the stately Pantheon, and found him 
not; and thus to me, who knew not bis name (if, indeed, 
be bad one), be seemed rather to have vanished from 
Oxford-street than to bave removed to any bodily 
5 



66 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

fashion. The reader may choose to think of him as, 
possibly, no more than a suWunary druggist : it may 
be so, but my faith is better: I believe him to have 
evanesced,'^ or evaporated. So unwillingly would I 
connect any mortal remembrances with that hour, and 
place, and creature, that first brought me acquainted 
with the celestial drug. 

Arrived at my lodgings, it mav be supposed that I 
lost not a moment in taking the quantity prescribed. I 
was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery 
of opium-taking; and what I took, I took under every 
disadvantage. But I took it ; and in an hour, — ■ oh 
heavens ! what a revulsion ! what an upheaving, from 
its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apoc- 
alypse of the world within me ! That my pains had 
vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative 
effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those posi- 
tive effects which had opened before me, in the abyss 
of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was 
a panacea, a cpuQuaxov v-encrOei, for all human woes; 
here was the secret of happiness, about which philos- 
ophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discov- 
ered ; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and 

^ Evanesced : — this way of going off from the stage of life 
appears to have been well known in the 17th century, but at that 
lime to have been considered a peculiar privilege of blood royal 
and by no means to be allowed to druggists. For, about the year 
1686, a poet of rather ominous name (and who, by the by, did 
ample justice to his name), namely, Mr. Flat-man, in speaking 
of the death of Charles II., expresses his surprise that any prince 
should commit so absurd an act as dying ; because, says he, 

Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear ; 
They should abscond, that is, into the other world. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 67 

carried in tlio waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies 
might be bad corked up in a pint-bottle ; and peace of 
mind conld be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach. 
But, if I talk in this way, the reader will think I am 
laughing; and I can assure him that nobody will laugh 
long who deals much with opium : its pleasures even 
are of a grave and solemn complexion ; and, in his hap- 
piest state, the opium-eater cannot present himself in 
the character of L' Allegro; even then, he speaks and 
thinks as becomes II Penseroso. Nevertheless, I have 
a very reprehensible way of jesting, at times, in the 
midst of my own misery; and, unless when I am 
checked by some more powerful feelings, I am afraid I 
shall be guilty of this indecent practice even in these 
annals of suffering or enjoyment. The reader must 
allow a little to my infirm nature in this respect ; and, 
with a few indulgences of that sort, I shall endeavor 
to be as grave, if not drowsy, as fits a theme like 
opium, so anti-mercurial as it really is, and so drowsy 
as it is falsely reputed. 

And, first, one word with respect to its bodily effects; 
for upon all that has been hitherto written on the sub- 
ject of opium, whether by travellers in Turkey (who 
may plead their privilege of lying as an old immemorial 
right) or by professors of medicine, writing ex cathedra, 
I have but one emphatic criticism to pronounce, — 
Lies ! lies ! lies ! I remember once, in passing a book- 
stall, to have caught these words from a page of some 
satiric author : " By this time I became convinced 
that the London newspapers spoke truth at least twice 
a week, namely, on Tuesday and Saturday, and might 
safely be depended upon for— the list of bankrupts." 



68 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

In like manner, I do by no means deny that some 
truths have been delivered to the world in regard to 
opium; thus, it has been repeatedly affirmed, by the 
learned, that opium is a dusky brown in color, — and 
this, take notice, I grant; secondly, that it is rather 
dear, which also I grant, — for, in my time. East India 
opium has been three guineas a pound, and Turkey, 
eight; and, thirdly, that if you eat a good deal of it, 
most probably you must do what is particularly dis- 
agreeable to any man of regular habits, namely, — die.^ 
These weighty propositions are, all and singular, true ; 
I cannot gainsay them; and truth ever was, and will 
be, commendable. But, in these three theorems, I 
believe we have exhausted the stock of knowledge as 
yet accumulated by man on the subject of opium. And, 
therefore, worthy doctors, as there seems to be room for 
further discoveries, stand aside, and allow me to come 
forward and lecture on this matter. 

First, then, it is not so much affirmed as taken for 
granted, by all who ever mention opium, formally or 
incidentally, that it does or can produce intoxication. 
Now, reader, assure yourself, meo periculo, that no 
quantity of opium ever did, or could, intoxicate. As 
to the tincture of opium (commonly called laudanum), 
that might certainly intoxicate, if a man could bear to 
take enough of it; but why? because it contains so 

* Of this, however, the learned appear latterly to have doubted ; 
for, ill a pirated edition of Buchan's Domestic Medicine, which 
I once saw in the hands of a farmer's wife, who Avas studying it 
for the benefit of her health, the doctor was made to say, — "Be 
particularly careful never to take above five-and-twenty ounces of 
laudanum at once." The true reading being probably five-and-twenty 
drops, which are held to be equal to about one grain of crude opium. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 69 

much proof spirit, and not because it contains so much 
opium. But crude opium, I affirm peremptorily, is 
incapable of producing any state of body at all resem- 
bling that which is produced by alcohol; and not in 
degree only incapable, but even in kind; it is not in 
the quantity of its effects merely, but in the quality, 
that it differs altogether. The pleasure given by wine 
is always mounting, and tending to a crisis, after which 
it declines ; that from opium, when once generated, is 
stationary for eight or \qxv hours : the first, to borrow a 
technical distinction from medicine, is a case of acute, 
the second of chronic, pleasure; the one is a flame, 
the other a steady and equable glow. But the main 
distinction lies in this, that whereas wine disorders the 
mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a 
proper manner), introduces amongst them the most 
exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs 
a man of his self-possession ; opium greatly invigorates 
it. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment, and gives 
a preternatural brightness, and a vivid exaltation, to the 
contempts and the admirations, to the loves and the 
hatreds, of the drinker; opium, on the contrary, com- 
municates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, 
active or passive ; and, with respect to the temper and 
moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of 
vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and 
which would probably always accompany a bodily con- 
stitution of primeval or antediluvian health. Thus, for 
instance, opium, like wine, gives an expansion to the 
heart and the benevolent affections; but, then, with this 
remarkable difference, that in the sudden development 
of kind-heartedness which accompanies inebriation, 



70 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

there is always more or less of a maudlin character, 
which exposes it to the contempt of the bystander. 
Men shake hands, swear eternal friendship, and shed 
tears, — no mortal knows why; and the sensual crea- 
ture is clearly uppermost. But the expansion of the 
benigner feelings, incident to opium, is no febrile ac- 
cess, but a healthy restoration to tliat state which the 
mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any 
deep-seated irritation of pain that had disturbed and 
quarrelled with the impulses of a heart originally just 
and good. True it is, that even wine, up to a certain 
point, and with certain men, rather tends to exalt and 
to steady the intellect ; I myself, who have never been 
a great wine-drinker, used to find that half a dozen 
glasses of wine advantageously affected the faculties, 
brightened and intensified the consciousness, and gave 
to the mind a feeling of being " ponderibus librata suis; " 
and certainly it is most absurdly said, in popular lan- 
guage, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, 
on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety; 
and it is when they are drinking (as some old gentle- 
man says in Athenseus) that men display themselves in 
their true complexion of character ; which surely is not 
disguising themselves. But still, wine constantly leads 
a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance; 
and, beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatilize and 
to disperse the intellectual energies; whereas opium 
always seems to compose what had been agitated, and 
to concentrate what had been distracted. In short, to 
sum up all in one word, a man who is inebriated, or 
tending to inebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a con- 
dition which calls up into supremacy the merely human, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 71 

too often the brutal, part of his nature ; but the 
opium-eater (I speak of him who is not suffering from 
any disease, or other remote effects of opium) feels 
that the diviner part of his nature is paramount ; that 
is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless 
serenity ; and over all is the great light of the majestic 
intellect. 

This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject 
of opium : of which church I acknowledge myself to 
be the only member, — the alpha and omega; but then 
it is to be recollected, that I speak from the ground of 
a large and profound personal experience, whereas most 
of the unscientific^ authors who have at all treated of 

* Amongst the great herd of travellers, &c., who show sufficiently 
by their stupidity that they never held any intercourse with opium, 
I must caution my readers specially against the brilliant author of 
'^ Anastasius." This gentleman, whose wit would lead one to pre- 
sume him an opium-eater, has made it impossible to consider him 
in that character, from the grievous misrepresentation which he has 
given of its effects, at page 215-217, of voL I. Upon consideration, 
it must appear such to the author himself; for, waiving the errors 
I have insisted on in the text, which (and others) are adopted in 
the fullest manner, he will himself admit that an old gentleman, 
"with a snow-white beard," who eats "ample doses of opium," 
and is yet able to deliver what is meant and received as very 
weighty counsel on the bad effects of that practice, is but an 
indifferent evidence that opium either kills people prematurely, or 
sends them into a mad-house. But, for my part, I see into this 
old gentleman and his motives ; the fact is, he was enamored of 
" the little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug," which Anas- 
tasius carried about him ; and no way of obtaining it so safe and 
so feasible occurred, as that of frightening its owner out of his 
wits (which, by the by, are none of the strongest). This com- 
mentary throws a new light upon the case, and greatly improves 
it as a story ; for the old gentleman's speech, considered as a lec- 
ture on pharmacy, is highly absurd ; but, considered as a hoax on 
Auastasius, it reads excellently. 



72 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

opium, and even of those who have written expressly 
on the materia medica, make it evident, from the hor- 
ror they express of it, that their experimental knowl- 
edge of its action is none at all. I will, however, 
candidly acknowledge that I have met with one person 
who bore evidence to its intoxicating power, such as 
stas^ijered my own incredulity; for he was a surgeon, 
and had himself taken opium largely. I happened to say 
to him, that his enemies (as I had heard) charged him 
with talking nonsense on politics, and that his friends 
apologized for him by suggesting that he was con- 
stantly in a state of intoxication from opium. Now, the 
accusation, said I, is not prima facie, and of necessity, 
an absurd one; but the defence is., To my surprise, 
however, he insisted that both his enemies and his 
friends were in the right. "I will maintain," said he, 
" that I do talk nonsense ; and secondly, I will maintain 
that I do not talk nonsense upon principle, or with 
any view to profit, but solely and simply," said he, 
"solely and simply, — solel}'- and simply (repeating it 
three times over), because I am drunk with opium; 
and that daily." I replied, that as to the allegation of 
his enemies, as it seemed to be established upon such 
respectable testimony, seeing that the three parties 
concerned all agreed in it, it did not become me to 
question it; but the defence set up I must demur to. He 
proceeded to discuss the matter, and to lay down his 
reasons ; but it seemed to me so impolite to pursue an 
argument which must have presumed a man mistaken 
in a point belonging to his own profession, that I did 
not press him even when his course of argument 
seemed open to objection ; not to mention that a man 



ENGLISH OPIUBI-EATER. 73 

who talks nonsense, even though " with no view to 
profit," is not altogether the most agreeable partner in a 
dispute, whether as opponent or respondent. I confess, 
however, that the authority of a surgeon, and one who 
was reputed a good one, may seem a weighty one to 
my prejudice ; but still I must plead my experience, 
which was greater than his greatest by.seven thousand 
drops a day ; and though it was not possible to sup- 
pose a medical man unacquainted with the characteris- 
tic symptoms of vinous intoxication, yet it struck me 
that he might proceed on a Jogical error of using the 
word intoxication with too great latitude, and extending 
it generically to all modes of nervous excitement, instead 
of restricting it as the expression for a specific sort of 
excitement, connected with certain diagnostics. Some 
people have maintained, in my hearing, that they had 
been drunk upon green tea ; and a medical student in 
London, for whose knowledge in his profession I have 
reason to feel great respect, assured me, the other day, 
that a patient, in recovering from an illness, had got 
drunk on a beef-steak. 

Having dwelt so much on this first and leading error 
in respect to opium, I shall notice very briefly a second 
and a third; which are, that the elevation of spirits 
produced by opium is necessarily followed by a propor- 
tionate depression, and that the natural and even imme- 
diate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, 
animal and mental. The first of these errors I shall 
content myself with simply denying; assuring my 
reader, that for ten years, during which I took opium at 
intervals, the day succeeding to that on which I allowed 



74 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

myself this luxury was always a day of unusually good 
spirits. 

With respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or 
rather (if we were to credit the numerous pictures of 
Turkish opium-eaters) to accompany, the practice of 
opium-eating, I deny that also. Certainly, opium is 
classed under the head of narcotics, and some ^uch. 
effect it may produce in the end; but the primary 
effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, 
to excite and stimulate the system : this first stage of 
its action always lasted with me, during my novitiate, 
for upwards of eight hours ; so that it must be the fault 
of the opium-eater himself, if he does not so time his 
exhibition of the dose (to speak medically) as that the 
whole weight of its narcotic influence may descend 
upon his sleep. Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are 
absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, 
on logs of wood as stupid as themselves. But, that the 
reader may judge of the degree in which opium is 
likely to stupefy the faculties of an Englishman, I shall 
(by way of treating the question illustratively, rather 
than argumentatively) describe the way in which I 
myself often passed an opium evening in London, 
during the period between 1804 and 1812. It will be 
seen, that at least opium did not move me to seek soli- 
tude, and much less to seek inactivity, or the torpid 
state of self-involution ascribed to the Turks. I give t 
this account at the risk of being pronounced a crazy^ 
enthusiast or visionary ; but I regard that little. I must 
desire my reader to bear in mind, that I was a hard 
student, and at severe studies for all the rest of my 
time ; and certainly I had a right occasionally to relaxa- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 75 

tions as well as other people : these, however, I allowed 
myself but seldom. 

The late Duke of used to say, " Next Friday, 

by the blessing of Heaven, I purpose to be drunk ;" and 
in like manner I used to fix beforehand how often, 
within a given time, and when, I w^ould commit a 
debauch of opium. This was seldom more than once in 
three weeks ; for at that time I could not have ventured 
to call every day (as I did afterwards) for " a glass of 
laudanum negus^ warm, and without sugary No ; as 
I have said, I seldom drank laudanum, at that time, 
more than once in three weeks : this was usually on a 
Tuesday or a Saturday night; my reason for which 
was this. In those days, Grassini sang at the opera, and 
her voice was delightful to me beyond all that I had ever 
heard. I kno^v not what may be the state of the opera- 
house now, having never been within its walls for seven 
or eight years ; but at that time it was by much the most 
pleasant place of resort in London for passing an even- 
ing. Five shillings adm.itted one to the gallery, which 
was subject to far less annoyance than the pit of the 
theatres ; the orchestra was distinguished, by its sweet 
and melodious grandeur, from all English orchestras, the 
composition of which, I confess, is not acceptable to my 
ear, from the predominance of the clangorous instru- 
ments, and the almost absolute tyranny of the violin. 
The choruses were divine to hear ; and when Grassini 
► appeared in some interlude, as she often did, and poured 
forth her passionate soul as Andromache, at the tomb of 
Hector, (fee, I j^uestion whether any Turk, of all that 
ever entered the paradise of opium-eaters, can have had 
half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I honor the barba- 



76 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

rians too much by supposing them capable of any 
pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an 
Englishman. For music is an intellectual or a sensual 
pleasure, according to the temperament of him who 
hears it. And, by the by, with the exception of the 
fine extravaganza on that subject in Twelfth Night, I 
do not recollect more than one thing said adequately 
on the subject of music in all literature ; it is a passage 
in the Religio Medici'^ of Sir T. Brown, and, though 
chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philo- 
sophic value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory 
of musical effects. The mxistake of most people is, to 
suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with 
music, and therefore that they are purely passive to its 
effects. But this is not so ; it is by the reaction of the 
mind upon the notices of the ear (the matter coming by 
the senses, the foim from the mind) that the pleasure is 
constructed ; and therefore it is that people of equally 
good ear differ so much in this point from one another. 
Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the 
mind, generally increases, of necessity, that particular 
mode of its activity by which we are able to construct 
out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate 
intellectual pleasure. But, says a friend, a succession 
of musical sounds is to me like a collection of Arabic 
characters: I can attach no id^as to them. Ideas! my 
good sir ? there is no occasion for them ; all that class 
of ideas which can be available in such a case has a 
language of representative feelings. But this is a sub- 

* I have not the book at this moment to consult ; but I think the 
passage begins, " And even that tavern music, which makes one 
man merry, another mad, in me strikes a deep fit of devotion," &,c. ^ 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 77 

ject foreign to my present purposes; it is sufficient to 
say, that a chorus, &c., of elaborate harmony, displayed 
before me, as in a piece of arras- work, the whole of my 
past life, — not as if recalled by an act of memory, 
but as if present and incarnated in the music; no longer 
painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its incidents 
removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction, and its 
passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this 
was to be had for five shillitigs. And over and above 
the music of the stage and the orchestra, I had all around 
me, in the intervals of the performance, the music of the 
Italian language talked by Italian women, — for the gal- 
lery was usually crowded with Italians, — and I listened 
with a pleasure such as that with which Weld, the trav- 
eller, lay and listened, in Canada, to the sweet laughter 
of Indian women ; for the less you understand of a lan- 
guage, the more sensible you are to the melody or harsh- 
ness of its sounds. For such a purpose, therefore, it was 
an advantage to me that I was a poor Italian scholar, 
reading it but little, and not speaking it at all, nor 
understanding a tenth part of what I heard spoken. 

These were my opera pleasures ; but another pleasure 
I had, which, as it could be had only on a Saturday 
night, occasionally struggled with my love of the opera ; 
for, at that time, Tuesday and Saturday were the 
regular opera nights. On this subject I am afraid I shall 
be rather obscure, but, I can assure the reader, not at all 
more so than Marinus in his life of Proclus, or many 
other biographers and auto-biographers of fair reputa- 
tion. This pleasure, I have said, was to be had only 
on a Saturday night. What, then, was Saturday night 
to me, more than any other night ? I had no labors that 



78 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

I rested from ; no wages to receive ; what needed I to 
care for Saturday night, more than as it was a summons 
to hear Grassini? True, most logical reader; what 
you say is unanswerable. And yet so it was and is, 
that whereas different men throw their feelings into 
different channels, and most are apt to show their inter- 
est in the concerns of the poor chiefly by sympathy, 
expressed in some shape or other, with their distresses 
and sorrows, I, at that time, was disposed to express my 
interest by sympathizing w^th their pleasures. The 
pains of poverty I had lately seen too much of, — more 
than I wished to remember; but the pleasures of the 
poor, their consolations of spirit, and their reposes from 
bodily toil, can never become oppressive to contemplate. 
Now, Saturday night is the season for the chief regular 
and periodic return of rest to the poor ; in this point the 
most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge a common 
link of brotherhood ; almost all Christendom rests from 
its labors. It is a rest introductory to another rest ; and 
divided by a whole day and two nights from the 
renewal of toil. On this account I feel always, on a 
Saturday night, as though I also were released from 
some yoke of labor, had some wages to receive, and 
some luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, there- 
fore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a 
spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, 1 
used often, on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, 
to wander forth, without much regarding the direction 
or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of 
London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, 
for laying out their wages. Many a family party, con- 
sisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 79 

of his children, have I listened to, as they stood con- 
sulting on their ways and means, or the strength of 
their exchequer, or the price of household articles. 
Gradually I became familiar with their washes, their 
difficulties, and their opinions. Sometimes there might 
be heard murmurs of discontent; but far oftener 
expressions on the countenance, or uttered in words, of 
patience, hope, and tranqaillity. And, taken generally, 
I must say, that, in this point, at least, the poor are far 
more philosophic than the rich ; that they show a more 
ready and cheerful submission to W'hat they consider as 
irremediable evils, or irreparable losses. Whenever I 
saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be 
intrusive, I joined their parties, and gave my opinion 
upon the matter in discussion, which, if not always 
judicious, was always received indulgently. If wages 
were a little higher, or expected to be so, or the quar- 
tern loaf a little lower, or it was reported that onions 
and butter were expected to fall, I was glad ; yet, if the 
contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of 
consoling myself. For opium (like the bee, that ex- 
tracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and 
from the soot of chimneys) can overrule all feelings 
into a compliance with the master-key. Some of these 
rambles led me to great distances ; for an opium-eater 
is too happy to observe the motion of time. And 
sometimes, in my attempts to steer homewards, upon 
nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, 
and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead 
of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I 
had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly 
upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical 



80 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

entries, and such sphinx's riddles of streets without 
thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity 
of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney- 
coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that 
I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrcR 
incognitcB, and doubted whether they had yet been laid 
down in the modern charts of London. For all this, 
however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when 
the human face tyrannized over my dreams, and the 
perplexities of my steps in London came back and 
haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities 
moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the 
reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience. 

Thus I have shown that opium does not, of necessity, 
produce inactivity or torpor; but that, on the contrary, 
it often led me into markets and theatres. Yet, in 
candor, I will admit that markets and theatres are not 
the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater, when in the 
divinest state incident to his enjoyment. In that state, 
crowds become an oppression to him ; music, even, too 
sensual and gross. He naturally seeks solitude and 
silence, as indispensable conditions of those trances, or 
profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consum- 
mation of what opium can do for human nature. I, 
whose disease it was to meditate too much and to 
observe too little, and who, upon my first entrance at 
college, was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, 
from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had 
witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the 
tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to 
counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who, 
according to the old legend, had entered the cave of 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 81 

Tropbonius ; and the remedies I sought were to force 
myself into society, and to keep my understanding in 
continual activity upon matters of science. But for 
these remedies, I should certainly have become hypo- 
chondriacally melancholy. In after years, however, 
when my cheerfulness was more fully rei'stablished, I 
yielded to my natural inclination for a solitary life. 
And at that time I often fell into these reveries upon 
taking opium ; and more than once it has happened to 
me, on a summer night, when I have been at an open 
window, in a room from which I could overlook the sea 
at a mile below me, and could command a view of the 

great town of L , at about the same distance, that I 

have sat from sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without 
wishing to move. 

I shall be charged with mysticism, Behmenism, quiet- 
ism, &c. ; but that shall not alarm me. Sir H. Vane, 
the younger, was one of our wisest men ; and let my 
readers see if he, in his philosophical works, be half as 
unmystical as I am. I say, then, that it has often 
struck me that the scene itself was somewhat typical 
of what took place in such a reverie. The town of 

L represented the earth, with its sorrows- and its 

graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly for- 
gotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, 
and brooded over by dove-like calm, might not unfitly 
typify the mind, and the mood which then swayed it. 
For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, 
and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the 
fever, and the strife, were suspended ; a respite granted 
from the secret 'burdens of the heart; a sabbath of 
repose ;*a resting from human labors. Here were the 
6 



82 CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 

hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with 
the peace which is in the grave ; motions of the intel- 
lect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a 
halcyon calm ; a tranquillity that seemed no product of 
inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antag- 
onisms; infinite activities, infinite repose. 

just, subtile, and mighty opium! that to the hearts 
of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never 
heal, and for "the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel," 
bringest an assuaging balm ; — eloquent opium ! that 
with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of 
wrath, and, to the guilty man, for one night givest back 
the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from 
blood ; and, to the proud man, a brief oblivion for 

Wrongs unredressed, and insults unavenged ; 

that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the 
triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses, and 
confoundest perjury, and dost reverse the sentences of 
unrighteous judges; — thou buildest upon the bosom of 
darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities 
and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, — 
beyond the splendor of Babylon and Hekatompylos ; 
and, "from the anarchy of dreaming sleep," callest 
into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and 
the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the 
"dishonors of the grave." Thou only givest these 
gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh 
just, subtile, and mighty opium ! 



INTRODUCTION 



TO 



THE PAINS or OPIUM 



Courteous, and, I hope, indulgent reader (for all 
my readers must be indulgent ones, or else, I fear, I 
shall shock them too much to count on their courtesy), 
having accompanied me thus far, now let me request 
you to move onwards, for about eight years ; that is to 
say, from 1804 (when I said that my acquaintance with 
opium first began) to 1812. The years of academic 
life are now over and gone, — almost forgotten ; the 
student's cap no longer presses my temples; if my 
cap exists at all, it presses those of some youthful 
scholar, I trust, as happy as myself, and as passionate 
a lover of knowledge. My gown is, by this time, I dare 
to say, in the same condition with many thousands of 
excellent books in the Bodleian, namelj'-, diligent!}' 
perused by certain studious moths and worms; or 
departed, however (which is all that I know of its 
fate), to that great reservoir of somewhere, to which 
all the tea-cups, tea-caddies, tea-pots, tea-kettles, &c., 



84 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

have departed (not to speak of still frailer vessels, such 
as glasses, decanters, bed-makers, &c.), which occa- 
sional resemblances in the present generation of tea- 
cups, &c., remind me of having once possessed, but of 
whose departure and final fate, I, in common with 
most gownsmen of either university, could give, I sus- 
pect, but an obscure and conjectural history. The 
persecutions of the chapel-bell, sounding its unwelcome 
summons to six o'clock matins, interrupts my slumbers 
no longer; the porter who rang it, upon whose beauti- 
ful nose (bronze, inlaid with copper) I WTote, in retali- 
ation, so many Greek epigrams whilst I was dressing, 
is dead, and has ceased to disturb anybody ; and I, 
and many others who suffered much from his tintin- 
nabulous propensities, have now agreed to overlook his 
errors, and have forgiven him.. Even with the bell I 
am now in charity; it rings, I suppose, as formerly, 
thrice a day; and cruelly annoys, 1 doubt not, many 
worthy gentlemen, and disturbs their peace of mind ; 
but, as to me, in this year 1S12, I regard its treach- 
erous voice no longer (treacherous I call it, for, by 
some refinement of malice, it spoke in as sweet and 
silvery tones as if it had been inviting one to a party) ; 
its tones have no longer, indeed, power to reach me, 
let the wind sit as favorable as the malice of the bell 
itself could wish ; for I am two hundred and fift}'' miles 
away from it, and buried in the depth of moun- 
tains. And what am I doino- amono^'st the mountains ? 
Taking opium. Yes, but what else ? Why, reader, in 
1812, the year we are now arrived at, as well as for 
some years previous, I have been chiefly studying 
German metaphysics, in the writings of Kant, Fichte, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 85 

Schelling, &c. And how, and in what manner, do I 
live ? in short, what class or description of men do I 
belong to? I am at this period, namely, in 1812, living 
in a cottage ; and with a single female servant [ho7ii soit 
qui mal y pe?ise), who, amongst my neighbors, passes by 
the name of my " house-keeper." And, as a scholar 
and a man of learned education, and in that sense a 
gentleman, I may presume to class myself as an unwor- 
thy member of that indefinite body called gentlemen. 
Partly on the ground I have assigned, perhaps, — 
partly because, from my having no visible calling or 
business, it is rightly judged that I must be living on 
my private fortune, — I am so classed by my neighbors ; 
and, by the courtesy of modern England, I am usually 
addressed on letters, &c.. Esquire, though having, I fear, 
in the rigorous construction of heralds, but slender 
pretensions to that distinguished honor; — yes, in popu- 
lar estimation, I am X. Y. Z., Esquire, but not Justice 
of the Peace, nor Gustos Rotulorum. Am I married ? 
Not yet. And I still take opium ? On^aturday nights. 
And, perhaps, have taken it unblushingly ever since 
" the rainy Sunday," and " the stately Pantheon," and 
" the beatific druggist " of 1804 ? Even so. And how 
do I find my health after all this opium-eating ? in 
short, how do I do ? Why, pretty well, I thank you, 
reader; in the phrase of ladies in the straw, "as well 
as can be expected." In fact, if I dared to say the 
real and simple truth (it must not be forgotten that 
hitherto I thought, to satisfy the theories of medical 
men, I ought to be ill), I was never better in my life 
than in the spring of 1812 ; and I hope sincerely, that 
the quantity of claret, port, or "• particular Madeira," 



Ob CONFESSIONS OF AN 

which, in all probability, you, good reader, have taken, 
and design to take, for every term of eight years, during 
your natural life, may as little disorder your health as 
mine was disordered by opium I had taken for the 
eight years between 1804 and 1812. Hence you may 
see again the danger of taking any medical advice 
from Anastasius ; in divinity, for aught I know, or law, 
he may be a safe counsellor, but not in medicine. 
No; it is far better to consult Dr. Buchan, as I did; for 
I never forgot that worthy man's excellent suggestion, 
and I was "particularly careful not to take above five- 
and-twenty ounces of laudanum." To this moderation 
and temperate use of the article I may ascribe it, I 
suppose, that as yet, at least (that is, in 1812), I am 
ignorant and unsuspicious of the avenging terrors which 
opium has in store for those who abuse its lenity. At 
the same time, I have been only a dilettante eater of 
opium; eight years' practice, even, with the single pre- 
caution of allowing sufficient intervals between every 
indulgence, ha^ not been sufficient to make opium 
necessary to me as an article of daily diet. But now 
comes a different era. Move on, if you please, reader, 
to 1813. In the summer of the year we have just 
quitted, I had suffered much in bodily health from dis- 
tress of mind connected with a very melancholy event. 
This event, being no ways related to the subject now 
before me, further than through bodily illness which it 
produced, I need not more particularly notice. Whether 
this illness of 1812 had any share in that of 1813, I 
know not ; but so it was, that, in the latter year, I was 
attacked by a most appalling irritation of the stomach, 
in all respects the same as that which had caused me 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 87 

SO much suffering in youth, and accompanied by a re- 
vival of all the old dreams. This is the point of my 
narrative on which, as respects my own self-justification, 
the whole of what follows may be said to hinge. And 
here I find myself in a perplexing dilemma : — Either, 
on the one hand, I must exhaust the reader's patience, 
by such a detail of my malady, and of my struggles 
with it, as might suffice to establish the fact of my 
inability to wrestle any longer with irritation and con- 
stant suffering; or, on the other hand, by passing lightly 
over this critical part of my story, I must forego the 
benefit of a stronger impression left on the mind of 
the reader, and must lay myself open to the miscon- 
struction of having slipped by the easy and gradual 
steps of self-indulging persons, from the first to the 
final stage of opium-eating (a misconstruction to which 
there will be a lurking predisposition in most readers, 
from my previous acknowledgments). This is the 
dilemma, the first horn of which would be sufficient to 
toss and gore any column of patient readers, though 
drawn up sixteen deep, and constantly relieved by fresh 
men ; consequently that is not to be thought of It 
remains, then, that I postulate so much as is necessary 
for my purpose. And let me take as full credit for 
what I postulate as if I had demonstrated it, good reader, 
at the expense of your patience and my own. Be not 
so ungenerous as to let me suffer in your good opinion 
through my own forbearance and regard for your 
comfort. No ; believe all that I ask of you, namely, that 
I could resist no longer, — believe it liberally, and as 
an act of grace, or else in mere prudence ; for, if not, 
then, in the next edition of my Opium Confessions, 



88 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

revised and enlarged, I will make you believe, and trem- 
ble ; and, a force d'eiinuyer, by mere dint of pandicula- 
tion, I will terrify all readers of mine from ever again 
questioning any postulate that I shall think (it to make. 
This, then, let me repeat : I postulate that, at the time 
I began to take opium daily, I could not have done 
otherwise. Whether, indeed, afterwards, I might not 
have succeeded in bi:eaking ofT the habit, even when 
it seemed to me that all efforts would be unavailing, 
and whether many of the innumerable efforts which I 
did make might not have been carried much further, 
and my gradual re-conquests of ground lost might not 
have been followed up much more energetically, — these 
are questions which I must decline. Perhaps I might 
make out a case of palliation ; but — shall I speak ingen- 
uously ? — I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, 
that I am too much of an Euda3monist; I hanker too 
much after a state of happiness, both for myself and 
others ; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not, 
with an eye of sufficient firmness ; and am little capa- 
ble of encountering present pain for the sake of any 
reversionary benefit. On some other matters, I can 
agree with the gentlemen in the cotton trade =^ at Man- 
chester in affecting the Stoic philosophy ; but not in 
this. Here I take the liberty of an Eclectic philosopher, 
and I look out for some courteous and considerate sect 
that will condescend more to the infirm condition of an 

*A handsome news-room, of which I was very politely made 
free iu passing through Manchester, hy several gentlemen of that 
place, is called, I think, The Porch; whence I, who am a stranger 
in Manchester, inferred that the subscribers meant to profess 
themselves followers of Zeno. Put I have been since assured that 
this is a mistake. 



ENGLISH OnUM-EATER. 89 

opium-eater; that are "sweet men," as Chaucer says, 
" to give absolution," and will show some conscience 
in the penances they inflict, and the efforts of absti- 
nence they exact from poor sinners like myself. An 
inhuman moralist I can no more endure, in my nervous 
state, than opium that has not been boiled. At any 
rate, he who summons me to send out a large freight 
of self-denial and mortification upon any cruising voyage 
of moral improvement, must make it clear to my under- 
standing that the concern is a hopeful one. At my 
time of life (six-and-thirty years of age), it cannot be 
supposed that I have much energ}'^ to spare ; in fact, I 
find it all little enough for the intellectual labors I have 
on my hands; and, therefore, let no man expect to 
frighten me by a few hard words into embarking any 
part of it upon desperate adventures of morality. 

Whether desperate or not, however, the issue of the 
struggle in 1813 was what I have mentioned ; and from 
this date the reader is to consider me as a regular and 
confirmed opium-eater, of whom to ask whether on any 
particular day he had or had not taken opium, would 
be to ask whether his lungs had performed respiration, 
or the heart fulfilled its functions. You understand 
now, reader, what I am ; and you are by this time 
aware, that no old gentleman, " with a snow-white 
beard," will have any chance of persuading me to sur- 
render " the little golden receptacle of the pernicious 
drug." No ; I give notice to all, whether moralists or 
surgeons, that whatever be their pretensions and skill in 
their respective lines of practice, they must not hope for 
any countenance from me, if they think to begin by 
any savage proposition for a Lent or Ramadam of absti- 



90 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

nence from opium. This, then, being all fully under- 
stood between us, we shall in future sail before the wind. 
Now, then, reader, from 1813, where all this time we 
have been sitting down and loitering, rise up, if you 
please, and walk forward about three years more. Now 
draw up the curtain, and you shall see me in a new 
character. 

If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he would 
tell us Avhat had been the happiest day in his life, and 
the why and the wherefore, I suppose that we should all 
ciy out. Hear him ! hear him ! As to the happiest 
day, that must be very difficult for any wise man to 
name; because any event, that could occupy so dis- 
tinguished a place in a man's retrospect of his life, or 
be entitled to have shed a special felicity on any one 
day, ought to be of such an enduring character, as that 
(accidents apart) it should have continued to shed the 
same felicity, or one not distinguishably less, on many 
years together. To the happiest histrum, however, or 
even to the happiest year, it may be allow^ed to any man 
to point without discountenance from wisdom. This 
year, in my case, reader, was the one which we have 
now reached ; though it stood, I confess, as a parenthe- 
sis between years of a gloomier character. It was a 
year of brilliant water (to speak after the manner of 
jewellers), set, as it were, and insulated, in the gloom 
and cloudy melancholy of opium. Strange as it may 
sound, I had a little before this time descended sud- 
denly, and without any considerable effort, from three hun- 
dred and twenty grains of opium (that is, eight =^ thou- 



* I here reckon twenty-five drops of laudanum as equivalent to 
one grain of opium, which, I believe, is the common estimate. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 91 

sand drops of laudanum) per day, to forty grains, or 
one-eighth part. Instantaneously, and as if by magic, 
the cloud of profoundest melancholy which rested upon 
my brain, like some black vapors that I have seen roll 
away from the summits of mountains, drew off in one 
day; passed off with its murky banners as simultane- 
ously as a ship that has been stranded, and is floated off 
by a spring tide, — 

That moveth altogether, if it move at all. 

Now, then, I was again happy : I now took only one 
thousand drops of laudanum per day, — and what was 
that ? A latter spring had come to close up the season 
of youth : my brain performed its functions as healthily 
as ever before. I read Kant again, and again I under- 
stood him, or fancied that I did. Again my feelings of 
pleasure expanded themselves to all around me ; and, if 
any man from Oxford or Cambridge, or from neither, 
had been announced to me in my unpretending cottage, 
I should have welcomed him with as sumptuous a 
reception as so poor a man could offer. Whatever 
else was wanting to a wise man's happiness, of lauda- 
num I would have given him as much as he wished, 
and in a golden cup. And, by the way, now that I 
speak of giving laudanum away, I remember, about 
this time, a little incident, which I mention, because, 

However, as both maybe considered variable quantities (the crude 
opium varying much in strength, and the tincture still more),. I 
suppose that no infinitesimal accuracy can be had in such a cal- 
culation. Tea-spoons vary as much in size as opium in strength. 
Small ones hold about one hundred drops: so that eight thousand 
drops are about eighty times a tea-spoonful. The reader sees how- 
much I kept within Dr. Buchan's indulgent allowance. 



92 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

trifling as it was, the reader will soon meet it again in 
my dreams, which it influenced more fearfully than 
could be imagined. One day a Malay knocked at my 
door. What business a Malay could have to transact 
amongst English mountains, I cannot conjecture ; but 
possibly he was on his road to a seaport about forty 
miles distant. 

The servant who opened the door to him was a 
young girl, born and bred amongst the mountains, who 
had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort: his turban, 
therefore, confounded her not a little ; and as it turned 
out that his attainments in English were exactly of the 
same extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be 
an impassable gulf fixed between all communication of 
ideas, if either party had happened to possess any. In 
this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed learning 
of her master (and, doubtless, giving me credit for a 
knowledge of all the languages of the earth, besides, 
perhaps, a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me 
to understand that there was a sort of demon below, 
whom she clearly imagined that my art could exorcise 
from the house. I did not immediately go down : but 
when I did, the group which presented itself, arranged 
as it was by accident, though not very elaborate, took 
hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that none of 
the statuesque attitudes exhibited in the ballets at the 
opera-house, though so ostentatiously complex, had 
ever done. In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on 
the wall with dark wood, that from age and rubbing 
resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall of 
entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay, his turban 
and loose trousers of dingy white relieved upon the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 93 

dark panelling; he had placed himself nearer to the 
girl than she seemed to relish, though her native spirit 
of mountain intrepidity contended with the feeling of 
simple awe which her countenance expressed, as she 
gazed upon the tiger-cat before her. And a more 
, striking picture there could not be imagined, than the 
beautiful English face of the girl, and its exquisite 
fairness, together with her erect and independent atti- 
tude, contrasted with the sallow and bilious skin of the 
Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany by 
marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, 
slavish gestures, and adorations. Half hidden by the 
ferocious-looking Malay, was a little child from a 
neighboring cottage, who had crept in after him, and 
was now in the act of reverting its head and gazing 
upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it, 
whilst with one hand he caught at the dress of the 
young woman for protection. 

My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remark- 
ably extensive, being, indeed, confined to two words, — 
the Arabic word for barley, and the Turkish for opium 
(madjoon), which I have learnt from Anastasius. And, 
as I had neither a Malay dictionary, nor even Ade- 
lung's Mithridates, which might have helped me to a 
few words, I addressed him in some lines from the 
Iliad ; considering that, of such language as I pos- 
sessed, the Greek, in point of longitude, came geo- 
graphically nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped 
me in a devout manner, and replied in what I suppose 
was Malay. In this way I saved my reputation with 
my neighbors f for the Malay had no means of betray- 
ing the secret. He lay down upon the floor for about an 



94 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

hour, and then pursued his journey. On his departure, 
I presented him with a piece of opium. To him, as an 
Orientalist, I concluded that opium must be familiar; 
and the expression of his face convinced me that it was. 
Nevertheless, I was struck with some little consterna- 
tion when I saw him suddenly raise his hand to his 
mouth, and (in the school-boy phrase) bolt the whole, 
divided into three pieces, at one mouthful. The quan- 
tity was enough to kill* three dragoons and their horses, 
and I felt some alarm for the poor creature ; but what 
could be done? I had given him the opium in com- 
passion for his solitary life, on recollecting that, if he 
had travelled on foot from London, it must be nearly 
three weeks since he could have exchanged a thought 
with any human being. 1 could not think of violating 
the laws of hospitality by having him seized and 
drenched with an emetic, and thus friirhtenins: him into 
a notion that we were going to sacrifice him to some 
English idol. No; there was clearly no help for it. 
He took his leave, and for some days I felt anxious; 
but, as I never heard of any Malay being found dead, I 
became convinced that he was used"^ to opium, and 

* This, however, is not a necessar}' conclusion ; the varieties of 
effect produced by opium on different constitutions are infinite. A 
London magistrate (Harriott's " Struggles through Life," vol. iii., 
p. 391, third edition) has recorded that on the first occasion of his 
trying laudanum for the gout, he took forty drops ; the next night 
SIXTY, and on the fifth night eighty, without any effect whatever ; 
and this at an advanced age. T have an anecdote from a country 
burgeon, however, which sinks Mr. Harriott's case into a trifle ; 
and, in my projected medical treatise on opium, which I will pub- 
lish, provided the College of Surgeons will pay me for enlightening 
their benighted understandings upon this subject, I will relate it ; 
but it is far too good a story to be published gratis. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 95 

that I must have done hnn the service I designed, by 
giving him one night of respite from the pains of 
wandering. 

This incident I have digressed to mention, because 
this Malay (partly from the picturesque exhibition he 
assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I connected 
with his image for some days) fastened afterwards upon 
my dreams, and brought other Malays with him worse 
than himself, that ran "a-muck"'^ at me, and led me 
into a world of troubles. But, to quit this episode, and 
to return to my intercalary year of happiness. I have 
said already, that on a subject so important to us all as 
happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any man's 
experience or experiments, even though he were but a 
ploughboy, who cannot be supposed to have ploughed 
very deep in such an intractable soil as that of human 
pains and pleasures, or to have conducted his researches 
upon any very enlightened principles. But I, who have 
taken happiness, both in a solid and a liquid shape, both 
boiled and unboiled, both East India and Turkey, — 
who have conducted my experiments upon this inter- 
esting subject with a sort of galvanic battery, — and 
have, for the general benefit of the world, inoculated 
myself, as it were, with the poison of eight hundred 
drops of laudanum per day (just for the same reason 
as a French surgeon inoculated himself lately with a 
cancer, — an English one, twenty years ago, with 
plague, — and a third, I know not of what nation, with 
hydrophobia), — I, it will be admitted, must surely 

* See the common accounts, in any Eastern traveller or voyager, 
of the frantic excesses committed by Malays who have taken 
opium, or are reduced to desperation by ill luck at gambling. 



96 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

know what happiness is, if anybody does. And there- 
fore I will here lay down an analysis of happiness; 
and, as the most interesting mode of communicating 
it, I will give it, not didactically, but wrapt up and 
involved in a picture of one evening, as I spent every 
evening during the intercalary year when laudanum, 
though taken daily, was to me no more than the elixir 
of pleasure. This done, I shall quit the subject of hap- 
piness altogether, and pass to a very different one, — 
the pains of opium. 

Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, eighteen 
miles from any town ; no spacious valley, but about 
two miles long by three quarters of a mile in average 
width, — the benefit of which provision is, that all the 
families resident within its circuit will compose, as it 
were, one larger household, personally familiar to your 
eye, and more or less interesting to your affections. 
Let the mountains be real mountains, between three and 
four thousand feet high, and the cottage a real cottage, 
not (as a witty author has it) " a cottage with a double 
coach-house ; " let it be, in fact (for I must abide by 
the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with 
flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of 
flowers upon the walls, and clustering around the win- 
dows, through all the months of spring, summer, and 
autumn ; beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending 
with jasmine. Let it, however, not be spring, nor 
summer, nor autumn; but winter, in its sternest shape. 
This is a most important point in the science of happi- 
ness. And I am surprised to see people overlook it, 
and think it matter of congratulation that winter is 
going, or, if coming, is not likely to be a severe one. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 97 

On tKe contrary, I put up a petition, annually, for as 
much snow, hail, frost, or storm of one kind or other, 
as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely everybody 
is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter 
fireside, — candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, 
tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in 
ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain 
are raging audibly without, 

And at the doors and windows seem to call 
As heaven and earth they would together mell ; 
Yet the least entrance find they none at all ; 
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall. 

Castle of Indolence, 

All these are items in the description of a winter 
evening which must surely be familiar to everybody 
born in a high latitude. And it is evident that most of 
these delicacies, like ice-cream, require a very low 
temperature of the atmosphere to produce them : they 
are fruits which cannot be ripened without w^eather 
stormy or inclement, in some way or other. I am not 
^^ particular,''^ as people say, whether it be snow, or 

black frost, or wind so strong that (as Mr. says) 

" you may lean your back against it like a post." I 
can put up even with rain, provided that it rains cats 
and dogs ; but something of the sort I must have ; and 
if I have not, I think myself in a manner ill used : for 
why am I called on to pay so heavily for winter, in 
coals, and candles, and various privations that will occur 
even to gentlemen, if I am not to have the article good 
of its kind ? No : a Canadian winter, for my money ; 
or a Russian one, where every man is but a co-proprie- 
tor with the north wind in the fee-simple of his own 
7 



98 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

ears. Indeed, so great an epicure am I in this matter, 
that I cannot relish a winter night fully, if it be much 
past St. Thomas' day, and have degenerated into dis- 
gusting tendencies to vernal appearances; — no, it must 
be divided by a thick wall of dark nights from all return 
of light and sunshine. From the latter weeks of October 
to Christmas-eve, therefore, is the period during which 
happiness is in season, which, in my judgment, enter the 
room with the tea-tray ; for tea, though ridiculed by 
those who are naturally of coarse nerves, or are become 
so from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible of influ- 
ence from so refined a stimulant, will always be the 
favorite beverage of the intellectual ; and, for my part, 
I would have joined Dr. Johnson in a bellum interjieci- 
num against Jonas Hanway, or any other impious person 
who should presume to disparage it. But here, to save 
myself the trouble of too much verbal description, I will 
introduce a painter, and give him directions for the rest 
of the picture. Painters do not like white cottages, 
unless a good deal weather-stained ; but, as the reader 
now understands that it is a winter night, his services 
will not be required except for the inside of the house. 
Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, 
and not more than seven and a half feet high. This, 
reader, is somewhat ambitiously styled, in my family, 
the drawing-room; but being contrived "a double debt 
to pay," it is also, and more justly, termed the library; 
for it happens that books are the only article of property 
in which I am richer than my neighbors. Of these I 
have about five thousand, collected gradually since my 
eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as 
you can into this room. Make it populous with books ; 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 99 

and, furthermore, paint me a good fire ; and furniture 
plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of 
a scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table ; and 
(as it is clear that no creature can come to see one, 
such a stormy night) place only two cups and saucers 
on the tea-tray ; and, if you know how to paint such a 
thing symbolically, or otherwise, paint me an eternal 
tea-pot, — eternal a parte a?ite, and a pa?-te post ; for 
I usually drink tea from eight o'clock at night to four 
in the morning. And, as it is very unpleasant to make 
tea, or to pour it out for one's self, paint me a lovely 
young woman, sitting at the table. Paint her arms like 
Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's; — but no, dear 
M., not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to 
illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable 
as mere personal beauty; or that the witchcraft of 
angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly 
pencil. Pass, then, my good painter, to something 
more within its power ; and the next article brought 
forward should naturally be myself, — a picture of the 
Opium-eater, with his " little golden receptacle of the 
pernicious drug" lying beside him on the table. As to 
the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of that, 
though I would rather see the original ; you may paint 
it, if you choose ; but I apprize you that no " little " 
receptacle would, even in 1816, answer my purpose, 
who was at a distance from the " stately Pantheon," and 
all druggists (mortal or otherwise). No : you may 
as w^ell paint the real receptacle, which was not of 
gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine-decanter as 
possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-colored 
laudanum; that, and a book of German metaphysics 



100 CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 

placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in 
the neighborhood ; but as to myself, there I demur. I 
admit that, naturally, I ought to occupy the foreground 
of the picture ; that being the hero of the piece, or (if 
you choose) the criminal at the bar, my body should be 
had into court. This seems reasonable ; but why should 
I confess, on this point, to a painter ? or, why confess at 
all ? If the public (into whose private ear I am conjEi- 
dentially whispering my confessions, and not into any 
painter's) should chance to have framed some agreeable 
picture for itself of the Opium-eater's exterior, — should 
have ascribed to him, romantically, an elegant person, 
or a handsome face, why should I barbarously tear 
from it so pleasing a delusion, — pleasing both to the 
public and to me ? No : paint me, if at all, according 
to your own fancy; and, as a painter's fancy should 
teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail, in that way, 
to be a gainer. And now, reader, we have run through 
all the ten categories of my condition, as it stood about 
1816 — 1817, up to the middle of which latter year 
I judge myself to have been a happy man; and the 
elements of that happiness I have endeavored to place 
before you, in the above sketch of the interior of a 
scholar's library, — in a cottage among the mountains, 
on a stormy winter evening. 

But now farewell, a long farewell, to happiness, 
winter or summer! farewell to smiles and laughter J 
farewell to peace of mind ! farewell to hope and to 
tranquil dreams, and to the blessed consolations of 
sleep ! For more than three years and a half I am 
summoned away from these ; I am now arrived at an 
Iliad of woes : for I have now to record 



THE PAINS OF OPIUM. 



as when some great painter dips 



His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. 

Shelley's Revolt of Islam. 

Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must 
request your attention to a brief explanatory note on 
three points : 

1. For several reasons, I have not been able to com- 
pose the notes for this part of my narrative into any 
regular and connected shape. I give the notes dis- 
jointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up 
from memory. Some of them point to their own date ; 
some I have dated ; and some are undated. Whenever 
it could answer my purpose to transplant them from the 
natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled to 
do so. Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes 
in the past tense. Few of the notes, perhaps, were 
written exactly at the period of time to which they 
relate ; but this can little affect their accuracy, as the 
impressions were such that they can never fade from 
my mind. Much has been omitted. I could not, 
without effort, constrain myself to the task of either 
recalling, or constructing into a regular narrative, the 



102 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

whole burden of horrors which lies upon my brain. 
This feeling, partly, I plead in excuse, and partly that 1 
am now in London, and am a helpless sort of person, 
who cannot even arrange his own papers without 
assistance; and I am separated from the hands 
which are wont to perform for me the offices of an 
amanuensis. 

2. You will think, perhaps, that I am too confidential 
and communicative of my own private history. It may 
be so. But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, 
and follow my own humors, than much to consider who 
is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is 
proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon 
come to doubt whether any part at all is proper. The 
fact is, I place myself at a distance of fifteen or twenty 
years ahead of this time, and suppose myself writing to 
those who will be interested about me hereafter; and 
wishing to have some record of a time, the entire 
history of which no one can know but myself, I do it 
as fully as I am able with the efforts I am now capable 
of making, because I know not whether I can ever find 
time to do it again. 

3. It will occur to you often to ask, Why did I not 
release myself from the horrors of opium, by leaving 
it off, or diminishing it? To this I must answer briefly; 
it might be supposed that I yielded to the fascinations 
of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any 
man can be charmed by its terrors. The reader may 
be sure, therefore, that I made attempts innumerable to 
reduce the quantity. I add, that those who witnessed 
the agonies of those attempts, and not myself, were the 
first to hecr me to desist. But could not I have reduced 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 103 

it a drop a day, or, by adding water, have bisected or 
trisected a drop ? A thousand drops bisected would 
thus have taken nearly six years to reduce ; and that 
they would certainly not have answered. But this is 
a common mistake of those who know nothing of opium 
experimentally ; I appeal to those who do, whether it is 
not always found that down to a certain point it can be 
reduced with ease, and even pleasure, but that, after that 
point, further reduction causes intense suffering. Yes, 
say many thoughtless persons, who know not what they 
are talking of, you will suffer a little low spirits and 
dejection, for a few days. I answer, no ; there is 
nothing like low spirits ; on the contrary, the mere 
animal spirits are uncommonly raised ; the pulse is 
improved; the health is better. It is not there that the 
suffering lies. It has no resemblance to the sufferings 
caused by renouncing wine. It is a state of unutterable 
irritation of stomach (which surely is not much like 
dejection), accompanied by intense perspirations, and 
feelings such as I shall not attempt to describe without 
more space at my command. 

I shall now enter "i/i medias res,'^ and shall anticipate, 
from a time when my opium pains might be said to be 
at their ac?ne, an account of their palsying effects on the 
intellectual faculties. 

My studies have now been long interrupted. I can- 
not read to myself with any pleasure, hardly with a 
moment's endurance. Yet I read aloud sometimes for 
the pleasure of others ; because reading is an accom- 
plishment of mine, and, in the slang use of the word 
accomplishment '^-s, a superficial and ornamental attain- 
ment, almost the only one I possess; and formerly, if 



104 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

I had any vanity at all connected with any endowment 
or attainment of mine, it was with this ; for I had 
observed that no accomplishment was so rare. Players 

are the worst readers of all : reads vilely ; and 

Mrs. , who is so celebrated, can read nothing well 

but dramatic compositions ; Milton she cannot read suf- 
ferably. People in general either read poetry without 
any passion at all, or else overstep the modesty of 
nature, and read not like scholars. Of late, if I have felt 
moved by anything in books, it has been by the grand 
lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great harmo- 
nies of the Satanic speeches in Paradise Regained, when 
read aloud by myself. A young lady sometimes comes 
and drinks tea with us ; at her request and M.'s, I now 

and then read W 's poems to them. (W., by the 

by, is the only poet I ever met who could read his own 
verses ; often, indeed, he reads admirably.) 

For nearly two years I believe that I read no book 
but one ; and I owe it to the author, in discharge of a 
great debt of gratitude, to mention what that was. 
The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as 
I have said, by snatches, and occasionally. But my 
proper vocation, as I well knew, was the exercise of 
the analytic understanding. Now, for the most part, 
analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued 
by fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts. Mathematics, 
for instance, intellectual philosophy, &c., were all be- 
come insupportable to me ; I shrunk from them with a 
sense of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave 
me an anguish the greater from remembering the time 
when I grappled with them to my own hourly delight ; 
and for this further reason, because I had devoted the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 105 

labor of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect, 
blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of 
constructing one single work, to which I had presumed 
to give the title of an unfinished work of Spinosa's, 
namely, De Emendatione Humani Intellectiis. This was 
now lying locked up as by frost, like any Spanish bridge 
or aqueduct, begun upon too great a scale for the 
resources of the architect ; and, instead of surviving me 
as a monument of wishes at least, and aspirations, and 
a life of labor dedicated to the. exaltation of human 
nature in that way in which God had best fitted me to 
promote so great an object, it was likely to stand a 
memorial to my children of hopes defeated, of baffled 
efforts, of materials uselessly accumulated, of founda- 
tions laid that were never to support a superstructure, 
of the grief and the ruin of the architect. In this 
state of imbecility, I had, for amusement, turned my 
attention to political economy ; my understanding, 
which formerly had been as active and restless as a 
hyena, could not, I suppose (so long as I lived at all), 
sink into utter lethargy; and political economy offers 
this advantage to a person in my state, that though it is 
eminently an organic science (no part, that is to say, 
but what acts on the whole, as the whole again reacts 
on each part), yet the several parts may be detached 
and contemplated singly. Great as was the prostration 
of my powers at this time, yet I could not forget my 
knowledge ; and my understanding had been for too 
many years intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, 
and the great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of 
the utter feebleness of the main herd of modern econo- 
mists. I had been led in 1811 to look into loads of 



106 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

books and pamphlets on many branches of economy; 
and, at my desire, M. sometimes read to me chapters 
from more recent works, or parts of parliamentary 
debates. I saw that these were generally the very dregs 
and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man 
of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with schol- 
astic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of 
modern economists, and throttle them between heaven 
and earth with his fmger and thumb, or bray their 
fungous heads to powder with a lady's fan. At length, 
in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. 
Kicardo's book; and, recurring to my own prophetic 
anticipation of the advent of some legislator for this 
science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, 
" Thou art the man ! " Wonder and curiosity were 
emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I won- 
dered once more : I wondered at myself that 1 could 
once again be stimulated to the effort of reading; and 
much more I wondered at the book. Had this profound 
work been really written in England during the nine- 
teenth century ? Was it possible ? I supposed think- 
ing^ had been extinct in England. Could it be 
that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, 
but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had 
accomplished what all the universities of Europe, and a 
century of thought, had failed even to advance by one 



* The reader must remember what I here mean by thinking ; 
because, else, this would be a very presumptuous expression. 
England, of late, has been rich to excess in fine thinkers, in the 
departments of creative and combining thought ; but there is a sad 
dearth of masculine thinkers in any analytic path. A Scotchman 
of eminent name has lately told us, that he is obliged to quit even 
mathematics, for want of encouragement. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 107 

hair's breadth ? All other writers had been crushed and 
overlaid by the enormous weights of facts and docu- 
ments ; Mr. Ricardo had deduced, a prioj-i, from the 
understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light 
into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had con- 
structed what had been but a collection of tentative dis- 
cussions into a science of regular proportions, now first 
standing on an eternal basis. 

Thus did one simple work of a profound understand- 
ing avail to give me a pleasure and an activity which 
I had not known for years ; — it roused me even to 
write, or, at least, to dictate what M. wrote for me. 
It seemed to me that some important truths had escaped 
even " the inevitable eye " of Mr. Ricardo ; and, as 
these were, for the most part, of such a nature that I 
could express or illustrate them more briefly and 
elegantly by algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy 
and loitering diction of economists, the whole would 
not have filled a pocket-book ; and being so brief, with 
M. for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as 
I was of all general exertion, I drew up my ProlegO' 
mena to all Future Systems of Political Economy. I 
hope it will not be found redolent of opium ; though, 
indeed, to most people, the subject itself is a sufficient 
opiate. 

This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, 
as the sequel showed ; for I designed to publish my 
w^ork. Arrangements were made at a provincial press, 
about eighteen miles distant, for printing it. An addi- 
tional compositor was retained for some days, on this 
account. The work was even twice advertised ; and 
I was, in a manner, pledged to the fulfilment of my 



108 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

intention. But I had a preface to write ; and a dedi- 
cation, which I wished to make a splendid one, to Mr. 
Ricardo. I found myself quite unable to accomplish 
all this. The arrangements were countermanded, the 
compositor dismissed, and my "prolegomena" rested 
peacefully by the side of its elder and more dignified 
brother. 

I have thus described and illustrated my intellectual 
torpor, in terms that apply, more or less, to every part 
of the four years during which I was under the Circean 
spells of opium. But for miseiy and suffering, I might, 
indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state. I 
seldom could prevail on myself to write a letter; an 
answer of a few words, to any that I received, was 
the utmost that I could accomplish ; and often that not 
until the letter had lain weeks, or even months, on my 
writing-table. AVithout the aid of M., all records of 
bills paid, or to be paid, must have perished ; and my 
whole domestic economy, whatever became of Political 
Economy, must have gone into irretrievable confusion. 
I shall not afterwards allude to this part of the case ; it 
is one, however, which the opium-eater will find, in the 
end, as oppressive and tormenting as any other, from 
the sense of incapacity and feebleness, from the direct 
embarrassments incident to the neglect or procrasti- 
nation of each day's appropriate duties, and from the 
remorse which must often exasperate the stings of 
these evils to a reflective and conscientious mind. 
The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities 
or aspirations ; he wishes and longs as earnestly as 
ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to 
be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 109 

of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of 
execution only, but even of power to attempt. He lies 
under the weight of incubus and night-mare ; he lies in 
sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man 
forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a 
relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or 
outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love : — 
he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; 
he would lay down his life if he might but get up and 
walk ; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even 
attempt to rise. 

I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter 
confessions, to the history and journal of what took place 
in my dreams ; for these were the immediate and prox- 
imate cause of my acutest suffering. 

The first notice I had of any important change going 
on in this part of my physical economy, was from the 
reawaking of a state of eye generally incident to 
childhood, or exalted states of irritability. I know not 
whether my reader is aware that many children, per- 
haps most, have a power of painting, as it were, upon 
the darkness, all sorts of phantoms : in some that 
power is simply a mechanic affection of the eye ; 
others have a voluntary or semi-voluntary power to 
dismiss or summon them ; or, as a child once said to 
me, when I questioned him on this matter, " I can tell 
them to go, and they go; but sometimes they come 
when I don't tell them to come." Whereupon I told 
him that he had almost as unlimited a command over 
apparitions as a Roman centurion over his soldiers. 
In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty 
became positively distressing to me : at night, when I 



110 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in 
mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending stories, that 
to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were 
stories drawn from times before (Edipus or Priam, before 
Tyre, before Memphis. And, at the same time, a cor- 
responding change took place in my dreams; a theatre 
seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, 
w^hich presented, nightly, spectacles of more than earthly 
splendor. And the four following facts may be men- 
tioned, as noticeable at this time : 

I. That, as the creative state of the eye increased, a 
sympathy seemed to arise betv/een the waking and the 
dreaming states of the brain in one point, — that what- 
soever I happened to call up and to trace by a volun- 
tary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer 
itself to my dreams ; so that I feared to exercise this 
faculty; for, as Midas turned all things to gold, that 
yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, 
so whatsoever things capable of being visually repre- 
sented I did but think of in the darkness, immediately 
shaped themselves into phantoms of the eye; and, by a 
process apparently no less inevitable, when thus once 
traced in faint and visionary colors, like writings in sym- 
pathetic ink, they were drawn out, by the fierce chemis- 
try of my dreams, into insufferable splendor that fretted 
my heart. 

II. For this, and all other changes in my dreams, 
were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy 
melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by 
words. 1 seemed every night to descend — not meta- 
phorically, but literally to descend — into chasms and 
sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. Ill 

seemed hopeless that I could ever reilscend. Nor did 1, 
by waking, feel that I had reascended. This I do not 
dwell upon ; because the state of gloom which attended 
these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at least to utter 
darkness, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be 
approached by words. 

III. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of 
time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, land- 
scapes, &;c., were exhibited in proportions so vast as 
the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, 
and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. 
This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast 
expansion of time. I sometimes seemed to have lived 
for seventy or one hundred years in one night; nay, 
sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium, 
passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond 
the limits of any human experience. 

IV. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten 
scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not 
be said to recollect them ; for if I had been told of 
them when waking, I should not have been able to 
acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. 
But placed as they were before me, in dreams like 
intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circum- 
stances and accompanying feelings, I recognized them 
instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative 
of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a 
river, and being on the very verge of death but for the 
critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a 
moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed 
before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had 
a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the 



112 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

whole and every part. This, from some opium expe- 
riences of mine, I can believe; I have, indeed, seen the 
same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accom- 
panied by a remark which I am convinced is true, namely, 
that the dread book of account, which the Scriptures 
speak of, is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. 
Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such 
thing as forgetting possible to the mind ; a thousand 
accidents may and will interpose a veil between our 
present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the 
mind. Accidents of the same sort will also rend away 
this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the 
inscription remains forever ; just as the stars seem to 
withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, 
in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn 
over' them as a veil; and that they are waiting to be 
revealed, when the obscuring daylight shall have with- 
drawn. 

Having noticed these four facts as memorably distin- 
guishing my dreams from those of health, I shall now 
cite a case illustrative of the first fact ; and shall then 
cite any others that I remember, either in their chro- 
nological order, or any other that may give them more 
effect as pictures to the reader. 

I had been in youth, and even since, for occasional 
amusement, a great reader of Livy, w^hom I confess 
that I prefer, both for style and matter, to any other 
of the Roman historians ; and I had often felt as most 
solemn and appalling sounds, and most emphatically 
representative of the majesty of the Roman people, the 
two words so often occurring in Livy — Cojisul Roma' 
nus ; especially w^hen the consul is introduced in his 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 113 

military character. I mean to say, that the words 
king, suhan, regent, &c., or any other titles of those 
who embody in their own persons the collective majesty 
of a great people, had less power over my reverential 
feelings. I had, also, though no great reader of history, 
made myself minutely and critically familiar wdth one 
period of English history, namely, the period of the Par- 
liamentary War, having been attracted by the moral 
grandeur of some who figured in that day, and by the 
many interesting memoirs which survive those unquiet 
times. Both these parts of m}^ lighter reading, having 
furnished me often with matter of reflection, now fur- 
nish me with matter for my dreams. Often I used 
to see, after painting upon the blank darkness, a sort 
of rehearsal whilst waking, a crowd of ladies, and per- 
haps a festival and dances. And I heard it said, or 
1 said to myself, " These are English ladies from the 
unhappy times of Charles I. These are the wives and 
daughters of those w^ho met in peace, and sat at the 
same tables, and were allied by marriage or by blood; 
and yet, after a certain day in August, 1642, never 
smiled upon each other again, nor met but in the field 
of battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at 
Naseby, cut asunder all ties of love by the cruel sabre, 
and washed away in blood the memory of ancient 
friendship." The ladies danced, and looked as lovely 
as the court of George IV. Yet I knew, even in my 
dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly two 
centuries. This pageant would suddenly dissolve ; and, 
at a clapping of hands, would be heard the heart- 
quaking sound oT Consul Rom anus ; and immediately 
came " sweeping by," in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus 
8 



114 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

or Marius, girt around by a company of centurions, with 
the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed by 
the alalagmos of the Roman legions. 

Many j^ears ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's 
Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing 
by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called 
his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own 
visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them 
(I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's ac- 
count) represented vast Gothic halls ; on the floor of 
which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, 
cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c., expressive of 
enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. 
Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a 
staircase ; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was 
Piranesi himself. Follow the stairs a little further, and 
you perceive it to come to a sudden, abrupt termination, 
without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards 
to him who had reached the extremity, except into the 
depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, 
you suppose, at least, that his labors must in some way 
terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a 
second flight of stairs still higher; on which again 
Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very 
brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a 
still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld ; and again is 
poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labors ; and so on, 
until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in 
the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power 
of endless growth and self-reproduction did my archi- 
tecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage of my 
malady, the splendors of my dreams were indeed 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 115 

chiefly architectural ; and I behehl such pomp of cities 
and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking 
eye, unless in the clouds. From a great modern poet 
I cite the part of a passage which describes, as an 
appearance actually beheld in the clouds, what in many 
of its circumstances I saw frequently in sleep : 

The appearance, instantaneously disclosed, 
Was of a mighty city — boldly say 
A wilderness of building, sinking far 
And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth, 
Far sinking into splendor — without end! 
Fabric it seemed of diamond, and of gold, 
With alabaster domes and silver spires, 
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high 
Uplifted ; here, serene pavilions bright, 
In avenues disposed ; there towers begirt 
With battlements that on their restless fronts 
Bore stars — illumination of all gems ! 
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought 
Upon the dark materials of the storm 
Now pacified ; on them, and on the coves. 
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereuato 
The vapors had receded — taking there 
Their station under a cerulean sky, &c. &c. 

The sublime circumstance — "battlements that on 
their restless fronts bore stars" — might have been 
copied from my architectural dreams, for it often oc- 
curred. We hear it reported of Dryden, and of Fuseli 
in modern times, that they thought proper to eat raw 
meat for the sake of obtaining splendid dreams : how 
much better, for such a purpose, to have eaten opium, 
which yet I do not remember that any poet is recorded 
to have done-, except the dramatist Shadwell ; and in 
ancient days, Homer is, I think, rightly reputed to have 
known the virtues of opium. 



116 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes, 
and silvery expanses of water : these haunted me so 
much, that I feared (though possibly it will appear 
ludicrous to a medical man) that some dropsical state or 
tendency of the brain might thus be making itself (to 
use a metaphysical word) objective, and the sentient 
organ project itself as its own object. For two months 
I suffered greatly in my head — a part of my bodily 
structure which had hitherto been so clear from all 
touch or taint of weakness (physically, I mean), that I 
used to say of it, as the last Lord Orford said of his 
stomach, that it seemed likely to survive the rest of my 
person. Till now I had never felt a headache even, or 
any the slightest pain, except rheumatic pains caused 
by my own folly. However, I got over this attack, 
though it must have been verging on something very 
dangerous. 

The waters now changed their character, — from 
translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they now be- 
came seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous 
change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll, 
through many months, promised an abiding torment ; 
and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of 
my case. Hitherto the human face had often mixed in 
my dreams, but not despotically, nor with any special 
power of tormenting. But now that which I have 
called the tyranny of the human face, began to unfold 
itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might be 
answerable for this. Be that as it may, now it was 
that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human 
face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with 
innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens; faces, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 117 

imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by 
thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: 
my agitation was infinite, my mind tossed, and surged 
with the ocean. 

May, 1818. — The Malay had been a fearful enemy 
for months. I have been every night, through his 
means, transported into Asiatic scenes. I know not 
whether others share in my feelings on this point; but 
I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego 
England, and to live in China, and among Chinese 
manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go 
mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of 
them must be common to others. Southern Asia, in 
general, is the seat of awful images and associations. 
As the cradle of the human race, it would alone have 
a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But 
there are other reasons. No man can pretend that the 
wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, 
or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way 
that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, 
and elaborate religions of Indostan, &c. The mere 
antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, 
modes of faith, &c., is so impressive, that to me the 
vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of 
youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to 
me an antediluvian man renewed. Even English- 
men, though not bred in any knowledge of such insti- 
tutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity 
of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, 
through such kn memorial tracts of time ; nor can any 
man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges, or the 
Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings, that 



lis CONFESSIONS OF AN 

Southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, 
the part of the earth most swarming with human life, 
the g-reat officina gentium. Man is a weed in those 
regions. The vast empires, also, into which the enor- 
mous population of Asia has always been cast, give a 
further sublimity to the feelings associated with all ori- 
ental names or images. In China, over and above what 
it has in common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am 
terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the 
barrier of utter abhorrence, and want of sympathy, 
placed between us by feelings deeper than I can ana- 
lyze. I could sooner live with lunatics, or brute ani- 
mals. All this, and much more than I can say, or 
have time to say, the reader must enter into, before he 
can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these 
dreams of oriental imagery, and mythological tortures, 
impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of 
tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together 
all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, 
usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical 
regions, and assembled them together in China or In- 
dostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt 
and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, 
hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by 
paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was 
fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms : 
I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; 
I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama 
through all the forests of Asia : Vishnu hated me ; 
Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenl}'- upon Isis 
and Osiris : I had done a deed, they said, which the 
ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 119 

thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and 
sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal 
pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by 
crocodiles ; and laid, confounded with all unutterable 
slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud. 

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my 
oriental dreams, which always filled me with such 
amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror 
seemed absorbed, for a while, in sheer astonishment. 
Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed 
up the astonishment, and left me, not so much in ter- 
ror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. 
Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim 
sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and 
infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. 
Into these dreams only, it was, with one or two slight 
exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror 
entered. All before had been moral and spiritual ter- 
rors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or 
snakes, or crocodiles, especially the last. The cursed 
crocodile became to me the object of more horror than 
almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him ; 
and (as was always the case, almost, in my dreams) for 
centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in 
Chinese houses with cane tables, &c. All the feet of 
the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life : 
the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering 
eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repe- 
titions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so 
often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that 
many times the very same dream was broken up in the 
very same w^ay : I heard gentle voices speaking to me 



120 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

(I hear everything when I am sleepmg), and instantly 
I awoke : it was broad noon, and my children were 
standing, hand in hand, at my bedside ; come to show 
me their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me 
see them dressed for going out. I protest that so 
awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, 
and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my 
dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of 
infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion of 
mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their 
faces. 

Jime, 1819. — I have had occasion to remark, at 
various periods of my life, that the deaths of those 
whom we love, and, indeed, the contemplation of death 
generally, is [ccBteris paribus) more affecting in sum- 
mer than in any other season of the year. And the 
reasons are these three, I think : first, that the visible 
heavens in summer appear far higher, more distant, 
and (if such a solecism may be excused) more infinite ; 
the clouds by which chiefly the eye expounds the dis- 
tance of the blue pavilion stretched over our heads are 
in summer mor* voluminous, massed, and accumulated 
in far grander and more towering piles : secondly, the 
light and the appearances of the declining and the set- 
ting sun are much more fitted to be types and charac- 
ters of the infinite : and, thirdly (which is the main 
reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life 
naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the 
antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility 
of the grave. For it may be observed, generally, that 
wherever tw^o thoughts stand related to each other by a 
law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 121 

repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other. On these 
accounts it is that I find it impossible to banish the 
thought of death when I am walking alone in the end- 
less days of summer; and any particular death, if not 
more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately 
and besiegingly, in that reason. Perhaps this cause, and 
a slight incident which I omit, might have been the 
immediate occasions of the following dream, to which, 
however, a predisposition must always have existed in 
my mind ; but having been once roused, it never left me, 
and split into a thousand fantastic varieties, which often 
suddenly reunited, and composed again the original 
dream. 

I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May; that 
it was Easter Sunday, and as yet very early in the 
morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me, at the 
door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the very 
scene which could really be commanded from that situa- 
tion, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnized by the 
power of dreams. There were the same mountains, and 
the same lovely valley at their feet ; but the mountains 
were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was 
interspace far larger between them of meadows and 
forest lawns; the hedges were rich with white roses; 
and no living creature was to be seen, excepting that in 
the green church-yard there were cattle tranquilly repos- 
ing upon the verdant graves, and particularly round 
about the grave of a child whom I had tenderly loved 
just as I had really beheld them, a little before sunrise, 
in the same summer, when that child died. I gazed 
upon the well-known scene, and I said aloud (as I 
thought) to myself, " It yet wants much of sunrise ; and 



122 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on which they 
celebrate the first fruits of resurrection. I will walk 
abroad ; old griefs shall be forgotten to-day ; for the air 
is cool and still, and the hills are high, and stretch away 
to heaven ; and the forest glades are as quiet as the 
church-yard; and with the dew I can wash the fever 
from my forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no 
longer." And I turned, as if to open my garden gate ; 
and immediately I saw upon the left a scene far differ- 
ent ; but which yet the power of dreams had reconciled 
into harmony with the other. The scene was an orien- 
tal one ; and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very 
early in the morning. And at a vast distance were visi- 
ble, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas 
of a great city — an image or faint abstraction, caught, 
perhaps, in childhood, from some picture of Jerusalem. 
And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone, and shaded 
by Judean palms, there sat a woman ; and I looked, and 
it was — Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly; 
and I said to her, at length, " So, then, I have found you, 
at last." I waited ; but she answered me not a word. 
Her face was the same as when I saw it last, and yet, 
again, how different ! Seventeen years ago, when the 
lamp-light fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed 
her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted !), her 
eyes were streaming with tears ; — her tears were now 
wiped away ; she seemed more beautiful than she w^as 
at that time, but in all other points the same, and not 
older. Her looks were tranquil, but with unusual solem- 
nity of expression, and I now gazed upon her with some 
awe ; but suddenly her countenance grew dim, and, turn- 
ing to the mountains, I perceived vapors rolling between 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 123 



us; in a moment, all had vanished; thick darkness 
came on ; and in the twinkling of an eye I was far away 
from mountains, and by lamp-light in Oxford-street, 
walking again with Ann— just as we walked seventeen 
years before, when we were both children. 

As a final specimen, I cite one of a different character, 

from 1820. 

The dream commenced with a music which now I 
often heard in dreams — a music of preparation and 
of awakening suspense ; a music like the opening of the 
Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feel- 
ina of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing ofT, and 
the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was 
come of a mighty day -a day of crisis and of final hope 
for human nature, then suffering some mysterious 
eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Some- 
where, I knew not where — somehow, I knew not how 
— by some beings, I knew not whom — a battle, a strife, 
an agony, was conducting, — was evolving like a great 
dmml, or piece of music ; with which my sympathy was 
the more insupportable from my confusion as to its 
place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is 
usual in dreams (whore, of necessity, we make ourselves 
central to every movement), had the power, and yet had 
not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could 
raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the 
power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, 
or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. " Deeper than 
ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a 
chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater mterest 
was at stake ; some mightier cause than ever yet the 
sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then 



124 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

came sudden alarms ; hurryings to and fro ; trepidations 
of innumerable fugitives. I knew not whether from the 
good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest 
and human faces ; and at last, with the sense that all 
was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth 
all the world to me, and but a moment allowed, — and 
clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then 

— everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh, such as the 
caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered 
the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated 

— everlasting farewells ! and again, and yet again rever- 
berated — everlasting farewells ! 

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud — "I will 
sleep no more ! " 

But I am now called upon to wind up a narrative 
which has already extended to an unreasonable length. 
Within more spacious limits, the materials which I 
have used might have been better unfolded ; and much 
which I have not used might have been added with 
eflfect. Perhaps, however, enough has been given. It 
now remains that I should say something of the way in 
which this conflict of horrors was finally brought to its 
crisis. The reader is already aware (from a passage 
near the beginning of the introduction to the first part) 
that the opium-eater has, in some way or other, "un- 
wound, almost to its final links, the accursed chain 
which bound him." By what means ? To have nar- 
rated this, according to the original intention, would 
have far exceeded the space which can now be allowed. 
It is fortunate, as such a cogent reason exists for abridg- 
ing it, that I should, on a maturer view of the case, have 
been exceedingly unwilling to injure, by any such unaf- 



ENGLISH OPmM-EATEK. ' 125 

fecting details, the impression of the history itself, as an 
appeal to the prudence and the conscience of the yet 
unconfirmed opium-eater, or even (though a very inferior 
consideration) to injure its effect as a composition. The 
interest of the judicious reader will not attach itself 
chiefly to the subject of the fascinating spells, but to the 
fascinating power. Not the opium-eater, but the opium, 
is the true hero of the tale, and the legitimate centre on 
which the interest revolves. The object was to display 
the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or 
for pain; if that is done, the action of the piece has 
closed. 

However, as some people, in spite of all laws to the 
contrary, will persist in asking what became of the 
opium-eater, and in what state he now is, I answer for 
him thus : The reader is aware that opium had long 
ceased to found its empire on spells of pleasure ; it 
was solely by the tortures connected with the attempt 
to abjure it, that it kept its hold. Yet, as other tor- 
tures, no less, it may be thought, attended the non- 
abjuration of such a tyrant, a choice only of evils was 
left; and that might as well have been adopted, which, 
however terrific in itself, held out a prospect of final 
restoration to happiness. This appears true ; but good 
logic gave the author no strength to act upon it. How- 
ever, a crisis arrived for the author's life, and a crisis 
for other objects still dearer to him, and which will 
always be far dearer to him than his life, even now 
that it is again a happy one. I saw that I must die, if 
I continued the opium: I determined, therefore, if that 
should be required, to die in throwing it off. How 
much I was at that time taking, I cannot say ; for the 



126 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

opium which I used had been purchased for me by a 
friend, who afterwards refused to let me pay him; so 
that I could not ascertain even what quantity I had 
used within a year. I apprehend, however, that I took 
it very irregularly, and that I varied from about fifty or 
sixty grains to one hundred and fifty a day. My first 
task was to reduce it to forty, to thirty, and, as fast as I 
could, to twelve grains. 

I triumphed ; but think not, reader, that therefore 
my sufferings were ended ; nor think of me as of one 
sitting in a dejected state. Think of me as of one, 
even when four months had passed, still agitated, 
writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered; and much, 
perhaps, in the situation of him who has been racked, 
as I collect the torments of that state from the affectingr 
account of them left by the most innocent sufferer^ (of 
the time of James I.). Meantime, I derived no benefit 
from any medicine, except one prescribed to me by an 
Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence, namely, ammo- 
niated tincture of valerian. Medical account, therefore, 
of my emancipation, I have not much to give; and 
even that little, as managed by a man so ignorant of 
medicine as myself, would probably tend only to mis- 
lead. At all events, it would be misplaced in this situa- 
tion. The moral of the narrative is addressed to the 
opium-eater; and therefore, of necessity, limited in its 
application. If he is taught to fear and tremble, enough 
has been effected. But he may say, that the issue of 
my case is at least a proof that opium, after a seven- 

* William Lithgow : his hook (Travels, &c.) is ill and pedanti- 
cally written ; hut the account of his own sufferings on the rack at 
Malaga is overpoweringly affecting. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 127 

teen years' use, and an eight years' abuse of its powers, 
may still be renounced; and that he may chance to 
bring to the task greater energy than I did, or that, 
with a stronger constitution than mine, he may obtain 
the same results w^ith less. This may be true ; 1 would 
not presume to measure the efforts of other men by my 
own. I heartily wish him more energy; I wish him the 
same success. Nevertheless, I had moHves external to 
myself which he may unfortunately want ; and these 
supplied me with conscientious supports, which mere 
personal interests might fail to supply to a mind debili- 
tated by opium. 

Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful 
to be born as to die. I think it probable ; and, during 
the whole period of diminishing the opium, I had the 
torments of a man passing out of one mode of existence 
into another. The issue was not death, but a sort of 
physical regeneration, and, I may add, that ever since, 
at intervals, I have had a restoration of more than 
youthful spirits, though under the pressure of difficulties, 
which, in a less happy state of mind, I should have 
called misfortunes. 

One memorial of my former condition still remains; 
my dreams are not yet perfectly calm ; the dread swell 
and agitation of the storm have not wholly subsided; the 
legions that encamped in them are drawing off, but not 
all departed; my sleep is tumultuous, and like the gates 
of Paradise to our first parents when looking back from 
afar, it is still (in the tremendous line of Milton) — 

With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. 



APPENDIX 



ii 



APPENDIX 



The proprietors of this little work having deter- 
mined on reprinting it, some explanation seems called 
for, to account for the non-appearance of a Third Part, 
promised in the London Magazine of December last; 
and the more so, because the proprietors, under whose 
guarantee that promise was issued, might otherwise be 
implicated in the blame — little or much — attached 
to its non-fulfilment. This blame, in mere justice, the 
author takes wholly upon himself. What may be the 
exact amount of the guilt which he thus appropriates, 
is a very dark question to his own judgment, and not 
much illuminated by any of the masters on casuistry 
whom he has consulted on the occasion. On the one 
hand, it seems generally agreed that a promise is bind- 
ing in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is 
made : for which reason it is that we see many per- 
sons break promises without scruple that are made to a 
whole nation, who keep their faith religiously in all pri- 
vate engagements, — breaches of promise towards the 
stronger party being committed at a man's own peril : 
on the other hand, the only parties interested in the 
promises of an author are his readers, and these it is a 



132 APPENDIX. 

point of modesty in any author to believe as few as pos- 
sible ; or perhaps only one, in which case any promise 
imposes a sanctity of moral obligation which it is shock- 
ing to think of. Casuistry dismissed, however, — the 
author throws himself on the indulgent consideration of 
all who may conceive themselves aggrieved by his delay, 
in the following account of his own condition from the 
end of last year, when the engagement was made, up 
nearly to the present time. For any purpose of self- 
excuse, it might be sufficient to say, that intolerable 
bodily suffering had totally disabled him for almost any 
exertion of mind, more especially for such as demand 
and presuppose a pleasurable and a genial state of feel- 
ing; but, as a case that may by possibility contribute a 
trifle to the medical history of opium in a further stage 
of its action than can often have been brought under the 
notice of professional men, he has judged that it might 
be acceptable to some readers to have it described more 
at length. Flat experimentum hi cor pore viU is a just 
rule where there is any reasonable presumption of ben- 
efit to arise on a large scale. What the benefit may 
be, will admit of a doubt; but there can be none as to 
the value of the body, for a more worthless body than 
his own, the author is free to confess, cannot be. It is 
his pride to believe, that it is the very ideal of a base, 
crazy, despicable human system, that hardly ever could 
have been meant to be seaworthy for two days under 
the ordinary storms and wear-and-tear of life ! and, 
indeed, if that were the creditable way of disposing 
of human bodies, he must own that he should almost 
be ashamed to bequeath his wretched structure to any 
respectable dog. But now to the case, which, for the 



APPENDIX. 133 

sake of avoiding the constant recurrence of a cumber- 
some periphrasis, the author will take the liberty of 
giving in the first person. 



Those who have read the Confessions will have 
closed them with the impression that I had wholly 
renounced the use of opium. This impression I meant 
to convey, and that for two reasons : first, because the 
very act of deliberately recording such a state of suffer- 
ing necessarily presumes in the recorder a power of 
surveying his own case as a cool spectator, and a 
degree of spirits for adequately describing it, which it 
would be inconsistent to suppose in any person speak- 
ing from the station of an actual sufTerer; secondly, 
because I, who had descended from so large a quantity 
as eight thousand drops to so small a one (compara- 
tively speaking) as a quantity ranging between three 
hundred and one hundred and sixty drops, might well 
suppose that the victory was in effect achieved. In 
suffering my readers, therefore, to think of me as of a 
reformed opium-eater, I left no impression but what I 
shared myself, and, as may be seen, even this impres- 
sion was left to be collected from the general tone of 
the conclusion, and not from any specific words, which 
are in no instance at variance with the literal truth. 
In no long time after that paper was written, I became 
sensible that -the effort which remained would cost me 
far more energy than I had anticipated, and the neces- 
sity for making it was more apparent every month. 



134 APPENDIX. 

In particular, I became aware of an increasing callous- 
ness or defect of sensibility in the stomach : and this I 
imagined might imply a schirrous state of that organ 
cither formed or forming. An eminent physician, 
to whose kindness I was, at that time, deeply indebted, 
informed me that such a termination of my case was not 
impossible, though likely to be forestalled by a different 
termination, in the event of my continuing the use of 
opium. Opium, therefore, I resolved wholly to abjure, 
as soon as I should find m3^self at liberty to bend m}"- 
undivided attention and energy to this purpose. It was 
not, however, until the 24th of June last that any toler- 
able concurrence of facilities for such an attempt 
arrived. On that day I began my experiment, having 
previously settled in my own mind that I would not 
flinch, but would "stand up to the scratch," under any 
possible " punishment." I must premise, that about 
one hundred and seventy or one hundred and eighty 
drops had been my ordinary allowance for many 
months. Occasionally I had run up as high as five 
hundred, and once nearly to seven hundred. In re- 
peated preludes to my final experiment I had also gone 
as low as one hundred drops, but had found it impos- 
sible to stand it beyond the fourth day, which, by the 
way, I have always found more difficult to get over 
than any of the preceding three. I went off" under 
easy sail — one hundred and thirty drops a day for 
three days ; on the fourth I plunged at once to eighty. 
The misery which I now suffered " took the conceit " 
out of me, at once ; and for about a month I continued 
off and on about this mark ; then I sunk to sixty, and 
the next day to —none at all. This was the first 



APPENDIX. 135 

day for nearly ten years that I had existed without 
opium. I persevered in my abstinence for ninety 
hours ; that is, upwards of half a week. Then I 

took ask me not how much; say, ye severest, 

what would ye have done? Then I abstained again; 
then took about twenty-five drops ; then abstained ; 
and so on. 

Meantime, the symptoms which attended my case 
for the first six weeks of the experiment were these : 
enormous irritability and excitement of the w^hole sys- 
tem ; the stomach, in particular, restored to a full 
feeling of vitality and sensibility, but often in great 
pain; unceasing restlessness night and day; sleep — I 
scarcely knew what it was — three hours out of the 
twenty-four was the utmost I had, and that so agitated 
and shallow that I heard every sound that was near 
me ; lower jaw constantly swelling ; mouth ulcerated ; 
and many other distressing symptoms that would be 
tedious to repeat, amongst which, however, 1 must men- 
tion one, because it had never failed to accompany any 
attempt to renounce opium, — namely, violent sternu- 
tation. This now became exceedingly troublesome ; 
sometimes lasting for two hours at once, and recurring 
at least twice or three times a day. I was not much 
surprised at this, on recollecting what I had somewhere 
heard or read, that the membrane which lines the nos- 
trils is a prolongation of that which lines the stomach ; 
whence, I believe, are explained the inflammatory ap- 
pearances about the nostrils of dram-drinkers. The 
sudden restoration of its original sensibility to the 
stomach expressed itself, I suppose, in this way. It is 
remarkable, also, that, during the whole period of years 



136 APPENDIX 

through which 1 had taken opium, I had never once 
caught cold (as the phrase is), nor even the slightest 
cough. But now a violent cold attacked me, and a 
cough soon after. In an unfinished fragment of a 

letter begun about this time to , I find these 

words : — " You ask me to write the . Do 

you know Beaumont and Fletcher's play of Thierry 
and Theodoret? There you will see my case as to 
sleep; nor is it much of an exaggeration in other 
features. I protest to you that I have a greater influx 
of thoughts in one hour at present than in a whole year 
under the reign of opium. It seems as though all the 
thoughts which had been frozen up for a decade of 
years by opium had now, according to the old fable, 
been thawed at once, such a multitude stream in upon 
me from all quarters. Yet such is my impatience and 
hideous irritability, that, for one which I detain and 
write down, fifty escape me. In spite of my weariness 
from suffering and want of sleep, I cannot stand still or 
sit for two minutes together. * I maic^ et versus tecum 
meditare canorosJ " 

At this stage of my experiment I sent to a neighbor- 
ing surgeon, requesting that he would come over to see 
me. In the evening he came, and after briefly stating 
the case to him, I asked this question : Whether he 
did not think that the opium might have acted as a 
stimulus to the digestive organs ; and that the present 
state of suffering in the stomach, which manifestly was 
the cause of the inability to sleep, might arise from 
indigestion ? His answer was, — No : on the contrary, 
he thought that the suffering was caused by digestion 
itself, which should naturally go on below the con- 



APPENDIX. 



137 



sciousness, but which, from the unnatural state of the 
stomach, vitiated by so long a use of opium, was be- 
come distinctly perceptible. This opinion was plausi- 
ble, and the unintermitting nature of the suffering dis- 
poses me to think that it was true ; for, if it had 
been any mere irregular affection of the stomach, it 
should naturally have intermitted occasionally, and con- 
btantly fluctuated as to degree. The intention of nature, 
as manifested in the healthy state, obviously is, to with- 
draw from our notice all the vital motions, such as the 
circulation of the blood, the expansion and contraction 
of the lungs, the peristaltic action of the stomach, &c. ; 
and opium, it seems, is able in this, as in other instances, 
to counteract her purposes. By the advice of the sur- 
o-eon, I tried hitters. For a short time these greatly 
mitigated the feelings under which I labored ; but 
about the forty-second day of the experiment the 
symptoms already noticed began to retire, and new 
ones to arise of a different and far more tormenting 
class ; under these, with but a few intervals of remis- 
sion, I have since continued to suffer. But I dismiss 
them undescribed for two reasons : first, because the 
mind revolts from retracing circumstantially any suffer- 
ings from which it is removed by too short or by no 
interval. To do this with minuteness enough to make 
the review of any use, would be indeed " infandum 
renovare dolorem;' and possibly without a sufficient 
motive : for, 2dly, I doubt whether this latter state be 
any way referable to opium, positively considered, or 
even negatively' ; that is, whether it is to be numbered 
amono-st the last evils from the direct action of opium, 
or even amongst the earliest evils consequent upon a 



138 APPENDIX. 

want of opium in a system long deranged by its use. 
Certainly one part of the symptoms might be ac- 
counted for from the time of year (August) ; for, 
though the summer was not a hot one, yet in any case 
the sum of all the heat funded (if one may say so) 
during the previous months, added to the existing heat 
of that month, naturally renders August in its better 
half the hottest part of the year; and it so happened 
that the excessive perspiration, which even at Christmas 
attends any great reduction in the daily quantum of 
opium, and which in July was so violent as to oblige 
me to use a bath five or six times a day, had about the 
setting in of the hottest season wholly retired, on which 
account any bad effect of the heat might be the more 
unmitigated. Another symptom, namely, what in my 
ignorance I call internal rheumatism (sometimes afTecting 
the shoulders, &c., but more often appearing to be seated 
in the stomach), seemed again less probably attributable 
to the opium, or the want of opium, than to the dampness 
of the housed which I inhabit, which had about that 
lime attained its maximum, July having been, as usual, 
a month of incessant rain in our most rainy part of 
England. 

Under these reasons for doubting whether opium 
had any connection with the latter stage of my bodily 

* In saying this, I meant no disrespect to the individual house, as 
the reader will understand when I tell him that, with the exception 
of one or two princely mansions, and some few inferior ones that 
have been coated with Roman cement, I am not acquainted with 
any house in this mountainous district which is wholly water- 
proof. The architecture of hooks, I flatter myself, is conducted on 
just principles in this country ; but for any other architecture, it U 
in a barbarous state, and, what is worse, in a retrograde state. 



APPENDIX. 139 

wretchedness — (except, indeed, as an occasional cause, 
as having left the body weaker and more crazy, and thus 
predisposed to any mal-influence whatever), — I wil- 
lingly spare my reader all description of it : let it perish 
to him ; and would that I could as easily say, let it per- 
ish to my own remembrances, that any future hours of 
tranquillity may not be disturbed by too vivid an ideal of 
possible human misery ! 

So much for the sequel of my experiment ; as to the 
former stage, in which properly lies the experiment and 
its application to other cases, I must request my reader 
not to forget the reasons for which I have recorded it. 
These were two. 1st, a belief that I might add some 
trifle to the history of opium as a medical agent ; in this 
I am aware that I have not at all fulfilled my own inten- 
tions, in consequence of the torpor of mind, pain of body, 
and extreme disgust to the subject, which besieged me 
whilst writing that part of my paper; which part being 
immediately sent off to the press (distant about five 
degrees of latitude), cannot be corrected or improved. 
But from tliis account, rambling as it may be, it is evi- 
dent that thus much of benefit may arise to the persons 
most interested in such a history of opium, — namely, 
to opium-eaters in general, — that it establishes, for their 
consolation and encouragement, the fact that opium may 
be renounced, and without greater sufferings than an 
ordinary resolution may support ; and by a pretty rapid 
course =^ of descent. 

* On which last notice I would remark that mine was too rapid, 
and the suffering therefore needlessly aggravated ; or rather, per- 
liaps, it was not sufficiently continuous and equal)ly graduated. 
But, that the reader may judge for himself, and, above all, that 



140 APPENDIX. 

To communicate this result of my experiment, was 
my foremost purpose. 2dly, as a purpose collateral to 

the opium-eater, who is preparing to retire from business, may 
have every sort of information before him, I subjoin my diary. 

SECOND WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. 
Mond. July 1 80 



FIRST 

Mond. June 24 


WEEK. 

Drops 


of Laud. 
. . 130 


" 25 . 




. . 140 


" 26 . 




. . 130 


" 27 . 




. . 80 


" 23 . 




. . 80 


" 29 . 




. . 80 


" 30 . 




. . 80 



THIRD WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. 

Mond. July 8 300 Mond. 

"9 50 



" 10 ^ 



Hiatus in 
12 i MS. 

13 
14 



^ 



" 2 




. . 80 


" 3 




. . 90 


.< 4 




. . 100 


" 5 




. . 80 


" 6 




. . 80 


(c Y 




. . 80 


FOURTH 


WEEK. 






Dropa 


of Laud. 


July 15 . 




. . 76 


" 16 . 




. . 73.V 


" 17 . 




. . 73} 


" 18 . 




. . 70 


" 19 . 




. .240 


" 20 . 




. . 80 


" 21 . 


. . . 


. .350 



FIFTH WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. 

Mond. July 22 60 

" 23 none 

'* 24 none 

" 25 none 

" 26 200 

" 27 none 

What mean these abrupt relapses, the reader will ask, perhaps, to 
such numbers as 300, 350, &c. ? The impulse to these relapses was 
mere infirmity of purpose ; the motive, where any motive blended 
with this impulse, was either the principle of " reculer pour mieux 
sauter — (for under the torpor of a large dose, which lasted for a 
day or two, a less quantity satisfied the stomach, which, on awaking, 
found itself partly accustomed to this new ration), — or else it was 



APPENDIX. 141 

this, I wished to explain how it had become impossible 
for me to compose a Third Part in time to accompany 
this republication : for during the very time of this 
experiment, the proof-sheets of this reprint were sent 
to me from London ; and such was my inability to 
expand or to improve them, that I could not even bear 
to read them over with attention enough to notice the 
press errors, or to correct any verbal inaccuracies. 
These were my reasons for troubling my reader with 
any record, long or short, of experiments relating to so 
truly base a subject as my own body ; and I am ear- 
nest with the reader, that he will not forget them, or so 
far misapprehend me as to believe it possible that I would 
condescend to so rascally a subject for its own sake, or, 
indeed, for any less object than that of general benefit 
to others. Such an animal as the self-observing vale- 
tudinarian, I know there is. I have met him myself 
occasionally, and I know that he is the worst imagin- 
able /ieG;z^^o?2^2??zo7-oz<7?z6'?io5 ; aggravating and sustaining, 
by calling into distinct consciousness, every symptom 
that would else, perhaps, under a different direction 
given to the thoughts, become evanescent. But as to 
myself, so profound is my contempt for this undigni- 
fied and selfish habit, that I could as little condescend 
to it as I could to spend my time in watching a poor 
servant-girl, to whom at this moment I hear some lad 
or other making love at the back of my house. Is it 
for a Transcendental philosopher to feel any curiosity 

this principle — thai of sufferings otherwise equal, those will be 
borne best which meet with a mood of anger ; now, whenever I 
ascended to any large dose, I was furiouslj' incensed on the follow- 
ing day, and could then have borne anything. 



1 42 APPENDIX. 

on such an occasion ? Or can I, whose life is worth 
only eight and a half years' purchase, be supposed 
to have leisure for such trivial employnients ? How- 
ever, to put this out of question, I shall say one thing 
which will, perhaps, shock some readers ; but I am 
sure it ought not to do so, considering the motives on 
which I say it. No man, 1 suppose, employs much of 
his time on the phenomena of his own body without 
some regard for it; whereas the reader sees that, so 
far from looking upon mine with any complacency or 
regard, I hate it and make it the object of my bitter 
ridicule and contempt ; and I should not be displeased 
to know that the last indignities which the law inflicts 
upon the bodies of the worst malefactors might here- 
after fall upon it. And in testification of my sincerity 
in saying this, I shall make the following offer. Like 
other men, I have particular fancies about the place of 
my burial; having lived chiefly in a mountainous re- 
gion, I rather cleave to the conceit that a grave in a 
green church-yard amongst the ancient and solitary 
hills will be a sublimer and more tranquil place of 
repose for a philosopher than any in the hideous Gol- 
gothas of London. Yet, if the gentlemen of Surgeons' 
Hall think that any benefit can redound to their science 
from inspecting the appearances in the body of an 
opium-eater, let them speak but a word, and I will 
take care that mine shall be legally secured to them 
— that is, as soon as I have done with it myself. Let 
them not hesitate to express their wishes upon any 
scruples of false delicacy and consideration for my 
feelings ; I assure them that they will do me too much 
honor by "demonstrating" on such a crazy body as 



APPENDIX. 143 

mine ; and it will give me pleasure to anticipate this 
posthumous revenge and insult inflicted upon that which 
has caused me so much suffering in this life. Such be- 
quests are not common ; reversionary benefits contingent 
upon the death of the testator are indeed dangerous to 
announce in many cases. Of this we have a remarka- 
ble instance in the habits of a Roman prince, who used, 
upon any notification made to him by rich persons, that 
they had left him a handsome estate in their wills, to 
express his entire satisfaction at such arrangements, and 
his gracious acceptance of those royal legacies; but then, 
if the testators neglected to give him immediate posses- 
sion of the property, — if they traitorously " persisted in 
living" [si vivere perseverare?it, as Suetonius expresses 
it), he was highly provoked, and took his measures 
accordingly. In those times, and from one of the w^orst 
of the Csesars, we might expect such conduct ; but I am 
sure that, from English surgeons at this day, I need look 
for no expressions of impatience, or of any other feelings 
but such as are answerable to that pure love of science, 
and all its interests, which induces me to make such an 
offer. 

Sept. ZOth, 1822. 



SUSPIRIA BE PROFIINDIS 



BEING A SEQUKL TO TTIR 



CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGTJSII OPTUIM-FATER 



10 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS : 

BEING A SEQUEL TO THE 

CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 

In 1821, as a contribution to a periodical work, — in 
1822, as a separate volume, — appeared the "Confes- 
sions of an English Opium-Eater." The object of that 
work was to reveal something of the grandeur which 
belongs potentially to human dreams. Whatever may- 
be the number of those in whom this faculty of dream- 
ing splendidly can be supposed to lurk, there are not 
perhaps very many in whom it is developed. He 
whose talk is of oxen, will probably dream of oxen ; 
and the condition of human life, which yokes so vast a 
majority to a daily experience incompatible with much 
elevation of thought, oftentimes neutralizes the tone of 
grandeur in the reproductive faculty of dreaming, even 
for those whose minds are populous with solemn im- 
agery. Habitually to dream magnificently, a man must 
have a constitutional determination to reverie. This in 
the first place, and even this, where it exists strongly, 



148 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

is too much liable to disturbance from the gathering 
agitation of our present English life. Already, in this 
year 1845, what by the procession through fifty years 
of mighty revolutions amongst the kingdoms of the 
earth, what by the continual development of vast 
physical agencies, — steam in all its applications, light 
getting under harness as a slave for man,^ powers 
from heaven descending upon education and accelera- 
tions of the press, powers from hell (as it might seem, 
but these also celestial) coming round upon artillery 
and the forces of destruction, — the eye of the calmest 
observer is troubled ; the brain is haunted as if by 
some jealousy of "ghostly beings moving amongst us; 
and it becomes too evident that, unless this colossal 
pace of advance can be retarded (a thing not to be 
expected), or, which is happily more probable, can be met 
by counter forces of corresponding magnitude, forces in 
the direction of religion or profound philosophy, that 
shall radiate centrifugally against this storm of life so 
perilously centripetal towards the vortex of the merely 
human, left to itself, the natural tendency of so chaotic 
a tumult must be to evil; for some minds to lunacy, 
for others to a reiigency of fleshly torpor. How much 
this fierce condition of eternal hurry upon an arena too 
exclusively human in its interests is likely to defeat 
the grandeur which is latent in all men, may be seen 
in the ordinary effect from living too constantly in 
varied company. The word dissipation^ in one of its 
uses, expresses that eflfect ; the action of thought and 
feeling is too much dissipated and squandered. To 

* Daguerreotype, &c. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 149 

reconcentrate them into meditative habits, a necessity 
is felt by all observing persons for sometimes retiring 
from crowds. No man ever will mifold the capacities 
of his own intellect who does not at least checker his 
life with solitude. How much solitude, so much power. 
Or, if not true in that rigor of expression, to this formula 
undoubtedly it is that the wise rule of life must approx- 
imate. 

Among the powers in man which suffer by this too 
intense life of the social instincts, none suffers more than 
the power of dreaming. Let no man think this a trifle. 
The machinery for dreaming planted in the human 
brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in 
alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great 
tube through which man communicates with the shad- 
owy. And the dreaming organ, in connection with the 
heart, the eye and the ear, compose the magnificent 
apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers 
of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from 
eternities below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping 
mind. 

But if this faculty suffers from the decay of solitude, 
which is becoming a visionary idea in England, on the 
other 'hand, it is certain that some merely physical agen- 
cies can and do assist the faculty of dreaming almost 
preternaturally. Amongst these is intense exercise ; to 
some extent at least, and for some persons ; but beyond 
all others is opium, which indeed seems to possess a spe- 
cific power in that direction ; not merely for exalting the 
colors of dream-scenery, but for deepening its shadows; 
and, above all, for strengthening the sense of its fearful 
realities. 



150 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

The Opium Confessions were written with some slight 
secondary purpose of exposing this specific power of 
opium upon the facuhy of dreaming, but much more with 
the purpose of displaying the faculty itself; and the out- 
line of the work travelled in this course. Supposing a 
reader acquainted with the true object of the Confes- 
sions as here stated, namely, the revelation of dreaming, 
to have put this question : 

*' But how came you to dream more splendidly than 
others ? " 

The answer would have been — 

" Because {prmnissis prcemittendis) I took excessive 
quantities of opium." 

Secondly, suppose him to say, " But how came you 
to take opium in this excess ? " 

The answer to that would be, " Because some early 
events in my life had left a weakness in -one organ 
which required (or seemed to require) that stimu- 
lant." 

Then, because the opium dreams could not always 
have been understood without a knowledge of these 
events, it became necessary to relate them. Now, these 
tw^o questions and answers exhibit the law of the work ; 
that is, the principle which determined its form, but pre- 
cisely in the inverse or regressive order. The work 
itself opened with the narration of my early adventures. 
These, in the natural order of succession, led to the opium 
as a resource for healing their consequences ; and the 
opium as naturally led to the dreams. But in the syn- 
thetic order of presenting the facts, what stood last in 
the succession of development stood first in the order of 
my purposes. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 151 

At the close of this little work, the reader was in- 
structed to believe, and truly instructed, that I had 
mastered the tyranny of opium. The fact is, that 
twice I mastered it, and by efforts even more prodi- 
gious in the second of these cases than in the first. 
But one error I committed in both. I did not connect 
with the abstinence from opium, so trying to the forti- 
tude under any circumstances, that enormity of excess 
which (as I have since learned) is the one sole re- 
source for making it endurable. I overlooked, in those 
days, the one si7ie qua non for making the triumph 
permanent. Twice 1 sank, twice I rose again. A third 
time I sank; partly from the cause mentioned (the over- 
sight as to exercise), partly from other causes, on which 
it avails not now to trouble the reader. I could moral- 
ize, if I chose ; and perhaps he will moralize, whether 
I choose it or not. But, in the mean time, neither of 
us is acquainted properly with the circumstances of 
the ca^e : I, from natural bias of judgment, not alto- 
gether acquainted ; and he (with his permission) not 
at all. 

During this third prostration before the dark idol, 
and after some years, new and monstrous phenomena 
began slowly to arise. For a time, these were neg- 
lected as accidents, or palliated by such remedies as 
I knew of. But when I could no longer conceal from 
myself that these dreadful symptoms were moving 
forward forever, by a pace steadily, solemnly, and 
equably increasing, I endeavored, with some feeling 
of panic, for a third time to retrace my steps. But 
I had not reversed my motions for many weeks, 
before I became profoundly aware that this was im- 



152 A SEQUEL TO THE COiNFESSIONS 

possible. Or, in the imagery of my dreams, which trans- 
lated everything into their own language, I saw through 
vast avenues of gloom those towering gates of ingress 
which hitherto had always seemed to stand open, now at 
last barred against my retreat, and hung with funeral 
crape. 

As applicable to this tremendous situation (the situa- 
tion of one escaping by some refluent current from the 
maelstrom roaring for him in the distance, who finds 
suddenly that this current is but an eddy, wheeling 
round upon the same maelstrom), I have since remem- 
bered a striking incident in a modern novel. A lady 
abbess of a convent, herself suspected of Protestant 
leanings, and in that way already disarmed of all 
effectual power, finds one of her own nuns (whom "she 
knows to be innocent) accused of an offence leading 
to the most terrific of punishments. The nun will be 
immured alive, if she is found guilty ; and there is no 
chance that she will not, for the evidence against her is 
strong, unless something were made known that cannot 
be made known ; and the judges are hostile. All fol- 
lows in tlie order of the reader's fears. The witnesses 
depose; the evidence is without effectual contradiction; 
the conviction is declared ; the judgment is delivered ; 
nothing remains but to see execution done. At this 
crisis, the abbess, alarmed too late for effectual interpo- 
sition, considers with herself that, according to the reg- 
ular forms, there will be one single night open, during 
w^hich the prisoner cannot be withdrawn from her own 
separate jurisdiction. This one night, therefore, she 
will use, at any hazard to herself, for the ^salvation of 
her friend. At midnight, when all is hushed in the 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUIM-EATER. 153 

convent, the lady traverses the passages which lead to 
the cells of prisoners. She bears a master-key under 
her professional habit. As this will open every door in 
every corridor, already, by anticipation, she feels the 
luxury of holding- her emancipated friend within her 
arms. Suddenly she has reached the door; she descries 
a dusky object; she raises her lamp, and, ranged within 
the recess of the entrance, she beholds the funeral ban- 
ner of the holy office, and the black robes of its inexor- 
able officials. 

I apprehend that, in a situation such as this, suppos- 
ing it a real one, the lady abbess would not start, would 
not show any marks externally of consternation or 
horror. The case was beyond that. The sentiment 
which attends the sudden revelation that all is lost 
silently is gathered up into the heart ; it is too deep for 
gestures or for words ; and no part of it passes to the 
outside. Were the ruin conditional, or were it in any 
point doubtful, it would be natural to utter ejaculations, 
and to seek sympathy. But where the ruin is under- 
stood to be absolute, where sympathy cannot be conso- 
lation, and counsel cannot be hope, this is otherwise. 
The voice perishes; the gestures are frozen; and the 
spirit of man flies back upon its own centre. I, at 
least, upon seeing those awfal gates closed and hung 
with draperies of woe, as for a death already past, 
spoke not, nor started, nor groaned. One profound 
sigh ascended from my heart, and I was silent for 
days. 

It is the record of this third or final stage of opium, 
as one differing in something more than degree from 
the others, that I am now undertaking. But a scruple 



154 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

arises as to the true interpretation of these final symp- 
toms. I have elsewhere explained, that it was no 
particular purpose of mine, and ichy it was no par- 
ticular purpose, to warn other opium-eaters. Still, as 
some few persons may use the record in that way, it 
becomes a matter of interest to ascertain how far it 
is likely, that, even with the same excesses, other 
opium-eaters could fall into the same condition. I do 
not mean to lay a stress upon any supposed idiosyn- 
crasy in myself. Possibly every man has an idiosyn- 
crasy. In some things, undoubtedly, he has. For no 
man ever yet resembled another man so far, as not to 
differ from him in features innumerable of his inner 
nature. But what I point to are not peculiarities of 
temperament or of organization, so much as peculiar 
circumstances and incidents through which my own 
separate experience had revolved. Some of these were 
of a nature to alter the whole economy of my mind. 
Great convulsions, from whatever cause, — from con- 
science, from fear, from grief, from struggles of the 
will, — sometimes, in passing away themselves, do not 
carry off the changes which they have worked. All 
the agitations of this magnitude which a man may have 
threaded in his life, he neither ought to report, nor 
crjuld report. But one which affected my childhood is 
a privileged exception. It is privileged as a proper 
communication for a stranger's ear; because, though 
relating to a man's proper self, it is a self so far 
removed from his present self as to wound no feel- 
ings of delicacy or just reserve. It is privileged, also, 
as a proper subject for the sympathy of the narrator. 
An adult sympathizes with himself in childhood 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 155 

because he is the same, and because (being the same) 
yet he is not the same. He acknowledges the deep, 
mysterious identity between himself, as adult and 
as infant, for the ground of his sj^mpathy ; and yet, 
with this general agreement, and necessity of agree- 
ment, he feels the differences between his two selves 
as the main quickeners of his sympathy. He pities 
the infirmities, as they arise to light in his young fore- 
runner, w^hich now, perhaps, he does not share ; he 
looks indulgently upon the errors of the understanding, 
or limitations of view which now he has long survived; 
and sometimes, also, he honors in the infant that recti- 
tude of will which, under some temptations, he may 
since have felt it so difficult to maintain. 

The particular case to which I refer in my own child- 
hood was one of intolerable grief; a trial, in fact, 
more severe than many people at a?iy age are called 
upon to stand. The relation in which the case stands 
to m}^ latter opium experiences is this: — Those vast 
clouds of gloomy grandeur which overhung my dreams 
at all stages of opium, but which grew into the darkest 
of miseries in the last, and that haunting of the human 
face, which latterly towered into a curse, — were they 
not partly derived from this childish experience ? It 
is certain that, from the essential solitude in which 
my childhood was passed ; from the depth of my sen- 
sibility ; from the exaltation of this by the resistance of 
an intellect too prematurely developed; it resulted that 
the terrific grief which I passed through drove a shaft 
for me into the" worlds of death and darkness which 
never again closed, and through which it might be said 
that I ascended and descended at will, according to the 



156 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

temper of my spirits. Some of the phenomena devel- 
oped in my dream-scenery, undoubtedly, do but repeat 
the experiences of childhood; and others seem likely 
to have been growths and fructifications from seeds at 
that time sown. 

The reasons, therefore, for prefixing some account 
of a " passage " in childhood to this record of a dread- 
ful visitation from opium excess are, 1st, That, in 
coloring, it harmonizes with that record, and, there- 
fore, is related to it at least in point of feeling; 2dly, 
That, possibly, it was in part the origin of some features 
in that record, and so far is related to it in logic; 
3dly, That, the final assault of opium being of a nature 
to challenge the attention of medical men, it is import- 
ant to clear away all doubts and scruples which can 
gather about the roots of such a malady. Was it 
opium, or was it opium in combination with something 
else, that raised these storms ? 

Some cynical reader will object, that for this last 
purpose it would have been sufficient to state the fact, 
without rehearsing in exteiiso the particulars of that 
case in childhood. But the reader of more kindness 
(for a surly reader is always a bad critic) will also have 
more discernment ; and he will perceive that it is not 
for the mere facts that the case is reported, but be- 
cause these facts move through a wilderness of natural 
thoughts or feelings : some in the child who suffers ; 
some in the man who reports ; but all so far interesting 
as they relate to solemn objects. Meantime, the objec- 
tion of the sullen critic reminds me of a scene some- 
times beheld at the English lakes. Figure to yourself 
an energetic tourist, who protests everywhere that he 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 157 

comes only to see the lakes. He has no business what- 
ever; he is not searching for any recreant indorser of 
a bill, but simply in search of the picturesque. Yet 
this man adjures every landlord, " by the virtue of his 
oath," to tell him, and, as he hopes for peace in this 
world, to tell him truly, which is the nearest road to 
Keswick. Next, he applies to the postilions, — the 
Westmoreland postilions always fly down hills at full 
stretch without locking, — but, nevertheless, in the full 
career of their fiery race, our picturesque man lets 
down the glasses, pulls up four horses and two postil- 
ions, at the risk of six necks and twenty legs, adjuring 
them to reveal whether they are taking the shortest 
road. Finally, he descries my unworthy self upon the 
road ; and, instantly stopping his flying equipage, he 
demands of me (as one whom he believes to be a 
scholar and a man of honor) whether there is not, 
in the possibility of things, a shorter cut to Keswick. 
Now, the answer which rises to the lips of landlord, 
two postilions, and myself, is this : " Most excellent 
stranger, as you come to the lakes simply to see 
their loveliness, might it not be as well to ask after 
the most beautiful road, rather than the shortest? 
Because, if abstract shortness, if to brevity, is your 
object, then the shortest of all possible tours would 
seem, with submission, never to have left London." 
On the same principle, I tell my critic that the whole 
course of this narrative resembles, and was meant to 
resemble, a caduceus wreathed about with meandering 
ornaments, or the shaft of a tree's stem hung round 
and surmounted with some vagrant parasitical plant. 
The mere medical subject of the opium answers to 



15S A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

the dry, withered pole, which shoots all the rings 
of the flowering plants, and seenns to do so by some 
dexterity of its own ; whereas, in fact, the plant and 
its tendrils have curled round the sullen cylinder by 
mere luxuriance of theirs. Just as in Cheapside, if 
you look right and left, the streets so narrow, that lead 
off at right angles, seem quarried and blasted out of 
some Babylonian brick-kiln; bored, not raised artifi- 
cially by the builder's hand. But, if you inquire of 
the worthy men who live in that neighborhood, you 
will find it unanimously deposed — that not the streets 
were quarried out of the bricks, but, on the contrary 
(most ridiculous as it seems), that the bricks have 
supervened upon the streets. 

The streets did not intrude amongst the bricks, but 
those cursed bricks came to imprison the streets. 
So, also, the ugly pole — hop-pole, vine-pole, espa- 
lier, no matter what — is there only for support. Not 
the flowers are for the pole, but the pole is for the 
flowers. Upon the same analogy, view me as one 
(in the words of a true and most impassioned poet ^) 
" viridantem Jloribus hastas " — making verdant, and 
gay with the life of flowers, murderous spears and 
halberts — things that express death in their origin 
(being made from dead substances that once had lived 
in forests), things that express ruin in their use. The 
true object in my "Opium Confessions" is not the 
naked physiological theme, — on the contrary, that is 
the ugly pole, the murderous spear, the halbert, — but 
those wandering musical variations upon the theme, — 

* Valerius Flaccus. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 159 

those parasitical thoughts, feelings, digrejsions, which 
climb up with bells and blossoms round about the arid 
stock; ramble away from it at times with perhaps 
too rank a luxuriance ; but at the same time, by the 
eternal interest attached to the subjects of these digres- 
sions, no matter what were the execution, spread a 
glory over incidents that for themselves would be — 
less than nothing. 



160 A SEQrEL TO THE CO^'FESSIONS 



PART I 



THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD. 

It is so painful to a lover of open-hearted sincerity 
that any indirect traits of vanity should even seem to 
creep into records of profound passion ; and yet, on the 
other hand, it is so impossible, without an unnatural 
restraint upon the freedom of the narrative, to prevent 
oblique gleams reaching the reader from such circum- 
stances of luxury or elegance as did really surround 
my childhood, that on all accounts I think it better to 
tell him, from the first, with the simplicity of truth, in 
what order of society my family moved at the time 
from which this preliminary narrative is dated. Other- 
wise it would happen that, m.efely by moving truly 
and faithfully through the circumstances of this early 
experience, I could hardly prevent the reader from 
receiving an impression as of some higher rank than 
did really belong to my family. My father w^as a 
merchant ; not in the sense of Scotland, where it 
means a man who sells groceries in a cellar, but in the 
English sense, a sense severely exclusive — namely, 
he was a man engaged in foreign commerce, and no 
other ; therefore, in wholesale commerce, and no other, 
— which last circumstance it is important to mention, 
because it brings him within the benefit of Cicero's 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 161 

condescending distinction ^ — as one to be despised, 
certainly, but not too intensely to be despised even by 
a Roman senator. He — this imperfectly despicable 
man — died at an early age, and very soon after the 
incidents here recorded, leaving to his family, then 
consisting of a wife and six children, an unburthened 
estate producing exactly £1600 a year. Naturally, 
therefore, at the date of my narrative, — if narrative it 
can be called, — he had an income still larger, from the 
addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any 
man who is acquainted with commercial life, but, above 
all, with such life in England, it will readily occur that 
in an opulent English family of that class, — opulent, 
though not rich in a mercantile estimate, — the domes- 
tic economy is likely to be upon a scale of liberality 
altogether unknown amongst the corresponding orders 
in foreign nations. Whether as to the establishment of 
servants, or as to the provision made for the comfort of 
all its members, such a household not uncommonly 
eclipses the scale of living even amongst the poorer 
classes of our nobility, though the most splendid in 
Europe — a fact which, since the period of my infancy, 
I have had many personal opportunities for verifying 
both in England and in Ireland. From this peculiar 
anomaly, affecting the domestic economy of merchants, 
there arises a disturbance upon the general scale of 
outward signs by which we measure the relations of 
rank. The equation, so to speak, between one order 



* Cicero, in a well-known passage of his Ethics, speaks of trade 
as irredcenialily base, if petty ; hut as not so absolutely felonious, 
if wholesale. He gives a real merchant (one who is such in the 
English sense) leave to think himself a shade above small beer. 



162 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

of society and another, which usually travels in the nat- 
ural line of their comparative expenditure, is here inter- 
rupted and defeated, so that one rank would be collected 
from the name of the occupation, and another rank, 
much higher, from the splendor of the domestic menage, 
I warn the reader, therefore (or, rather, my explanation 
has already warned him), that he is not to infer, from 
any casual gleam of luxury or elegance, a corresponding 
elevation of rank. 

We, the children of the house, stood in fact upon the 
very happiest tier in the scaffolding' of society for all 
good influences. The prayer of Agar — "Give me 
neither poverty nor riches " — was realized for us. 
That blessing had we, being neither too high nor too 
low : high enough we were to see models of good 
manners ; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of 
solitudes. Amply furnished with the nobler benefits of 
wealth, extra means of health, of intellectual culture, 
and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand, we knew 
nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the 
consciousness of privations too sordid, not tempted into 
restlessness by the consciousness of privileges too aspir- 
ing, we had no motives for shame, we had none for 
pride. Grateful also to this hour I am, that, amidst 
luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan 
simplicity of diet, — that we fared, in fact, very much 
less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the 
model of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should 
return thanks to Providence for all the separate bless- 
ings of my early situation, these four I would single 
out as chiefly worthy to be commemorated — that 1 
lived in the country ; that 1 lived in solitude ; that my 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 163 

infant feelings were moulded b}^ the gentlest of sisters, 
not by horrid pugilistic brothers ; finally, that I and they 
were dutiful children, of a pure, holy, and magnificent 
church. 



The earliest incidents in my life which affected me 
so deeply as to be rememberable at this day were two, 
and both before I could have completed my second year ; 
namely, a remarkable dream of terrific grandeur about a 
favorite nurse, which is interesting for a reason to be 
noticed hereafter ; and, secondly, the fact of having con- 
nected a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance, 
very early in the spring, of some crocuses. This I 
mention as inexplicable, for such annual resurrections of 
plants and flowers afl^ect us only as memorials, or sug- 
gestions of a higher change, and therefore in connection 
with the idea of death ; but of death I could, at that 
time, have had no experience whatever. 

This, however, I was speedily to acquire. My two 
eldest sisters — eldest of three then living, and also elder 
than myself — were summoned to an early death. The 
first who died was Jane, about a year older than my- 
self. She was three and a half, I two and a half, plus 
or minus some trifle that I do not recollect. But death 
was then scarcely intelligible to me, and I could not 
so properly be said to suffer sorrow as a sad perplex- 
ity. There was another death in the house about 
the same time, namely, of a maternal grandmother ; but 
as she had in a" manner come to us for the express 
purpose of dying in her daughter's society, and from 
illness had lived perfectly secluded, our nursery party 



164 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

knew her but little, and were certainly more affected by 
the death (which I witnessed) of a favorite bird, namely, 
a kingfisher who had been injured by an accident. 
With my sister Jane's death (though otherwise, as 
I have said, less sorrowful than unintelligible) there 
was, however, connected an incident which made a 
most fearful impression upon myself, deepening my 
tendencies to thoughtfulness and abstraction beyond 
what would seem credible for my years. If there was 
one thing in this world from which, more than from 
any other, nature had forced me to revolt, it was brutal- 
ity and violence. Now, a whisper arose in the family 
that a woman-servant, who by accident was drawn off 
from her proper duties to attend my sister Jane for a 
day or two, had on one occasion treated her harshly, 
if not brutally; and as this ill treatment happened 
within two days of her death, so that the occasion of it 
must have been some fretfulness in the poor child 
caused by her sufferings, naturally there was a sense 
of awe diffused through the family. I believe the 
story never reached my mother, and possibly it was 
exaggerated; but upon me the effect was terrific. I 
did not often see the person charged with this cruelty ; 
but, when I did, my eyes sought the ground ; nor 
could I have borne to look her in the face — not 
through anger; and as to vindictive thoughts, how 
could these lodge in a powerless infant ? The feeling 
which fell upon me was a shuddering awe, as upon a 
first glimpse of the truth that I was in a world of evil 
and strife. Though born in a large town, I had passed 
the whole of my childhood, except for the few earliest 
weeks, in a rural seclusion. With three innocent little 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 165 

sisters for playmates, sleeping always amongst them, 
and shut up forever in a silent garden from all knowl- 
edge of poverty, or oppression, or outrage, I had not 
suspected until this moment the true complexion of the 
world in which myself and my sisters were living. 
Henceforward the character of my thoughts must have 
changed greatly ; for so representative are some acts, 
that one single case of the class is sufficient to throw 
open hefore you the whole theatre of possibilities in 
that direction. I never heard that the woman, accused 
of this cruelty, took it at all to heart, even after the 
event which so immediately succeeded had reflected 
upon it a more painful emphasis. On the other hand, I 
knew of a case, and will pause to mention it, where a 
mere semblance and shadow of such cruelty, under sim- 
ilar circumstances, inflicted the grief of self-reproach 
through the remainder of life. A boy, interesting in 
his appearance, as also from his remarkable docility, was 
attacked, on a cold day of spring, by a complaint of the 
trachea — not precisely croup, but like it. He was 
three years old, and had been ill perhaps for four 
days ; but at intervals had been in high spirits, and 
capable of playing. This sunshine, gleaming through 
dark clouds, had continued even on the fourth day; 
and from nine to eleven o'clock at night he had showed 
more animated pleasure than ever. An old servant, 
hearing of his illness, had called to see him ; and her 
mode of talking with him had excited all the joyous- 
ness of his nature. About midnight, his mother, fancy- 
ing that his feet felt cold, was muffling them up in 
flannels ; and, as he seemed to resist her a little, she 
struck lightly on the sole of one foot as a mode of 



166 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

admonishing him to be quiet. He did not repeat his 
motion ; and in less than a minute his mother had him 
in her arms with his face looking upwards. "What is 
the meaning," she exclaimed, in sudden affright, " of 
this strange repose settling upon his features?" She 
called loudly to a servant in another room ; but before 
the servant could reach her, the child had drawn two 
inspirations, deep, yet gentle — and had died in his 
mother's arms ! Upon this, the poor afflicted lady made 
the discovery that those struggles, which she had sup- 
posed to be expressions of resistance to herself, were the 
struggles of departing life. It followed, or seemed to 
follow, that with these fmal struggles had blended an 
expression, on her part, of displeasure. Doubtless the 
child had not distinctly perceived it ; but the mother 
could never look back to that incident without self- 
reproach. And seven years after, when her own death 
happened, no progress had been made in reconciling her 
thoughts to that which only the depth of love could have 
viewed as an offence. 

So passed away from earth one out of those sisters 
that made up my nursery playmates; and so did my 
acquaintance (if such it could be called) commence with 
mortality. Yet, in fact, I knew little more of mortality 
than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away; 
but, perhaps, she would come back. Happy interval of 
heaven-born ignorance! Gracious immunity of infancy 
from sorrow disproportioned to its strength ! I was 
sad for Jane's absence. But still in my heart I 
trusted that she would come again. Summer and 
winter came again — crocuses and roses ; why not little 
Jane ? 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 



167 



Thus easily was healed, then, the first wound in my 
infant heart. Not so the second. For thou, dear, noble 
Elizabeth, around whose ample brow, as often as thy 
sweet countenance rises upon the darkness, I fancy a 
tiara of light or a gleaming aureola in token of thy 
premature intellectual grandeur, — thou whose head, for 
its superb developments, was the astonishment of sci- 
ence, ^ — thou next, but after an int^erval of happy 
years, thou also wert summoned away from our nurs- 
ery ; and the night which, for me, gathered upon that 
event, ran after my steps far into life ; and perhaps at 
this day I resemble little for good or for ill that which 
else I should have been. Pillar of fire that didst go 
before me to guide and to quicken, — pillar of dark- 
ness, when thy countenance was turned away to God, 

* " The astonishment of science." — Her medical attendants were 
Dr. Percival, a well-known literary physician, who had been a cor- 
respondent of Condorcet, D' Alembert, &c., and Mr. Charles White, 
a very distinguished surgeon. It was he who pronounced her head 
to be the finest in its structure and development of any tliat he had 
ever seen, — an assertion which, to my ownknoAvIedge, he repeated 
in after years, and with enthusiasm. That he had some,acquaint- 
ance with the subject may be presumed from this, that he wrote and 
published a work on the human skull, supported by many measure- 
ments -^hich he had made of heads selected from all varieties of 
the human species. Meantime, as Fwould be loath that any trait 
of what might seem vanity should creep into this record, I will 
candidly admit that she died of hydrocephalus ; and it has been 
often supposed that the premature expansion of the intellect in 
cases of that class is altogether morbid, — forced on, in fact, by the 
mere stimulation of the disease. I would, however, suggest, as a 
possibility, the very inverse order of relation between the disease 
and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease may always 
have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect ; but, on the 
contrary, this growth coming on spontaneously, and outrunning the 
capacities of the physical structure, may have caused the disease. 



168 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

that didst too truly shed the shadow of death over my 
young heart, — in what scales should I weigh thee ? Was 
the blessing greater from thy heavenly presence, or the 
blight which followed thy departure ? Can a man weigh 
off and value the glories of dawn against the darkness 
of hurricane ? Or, if he could, how is it that, when a 
memorable love has been followed by a memorable be- 
reavement, even suppose that God would replace the suf- 
ferer in a point of time anterior to the entire experience, 
and offer to cancel the woe, but so that the sweet face 
which had caused the woe should also be obliterated, 
vehemently would every man shrink from the exchange ! 
In the Paradise Lost, this strong instinct of man, to pre- 
fer the heavenly, mixed and polluted with the earthly, to 
a level experience offering neither one nor the other, is 
divinely commemorated. What words of pathos are in 
that speech of Adam's — " If God should make another 
Eve," &c. ; that is, if God should replace him in his 
primitive state, and should condescend to bring again a 
second Eve, one that would listen to no temptation, still 
that original partner of his earliest solitude — 

"Creature in -whom excelled 
Whatever can to sight or thought be formed, 
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet" — 

even now, when she appeared in league with an eternity 
of woe, and ministering to his ruin, could not be dis- 
placed for him by any better or happier Eve. " Loss 
of thee ! " he exclaims, in this anguish of trial — 

" Loss of thee 
Would never from my heart ; no, no, I feel 
The link of nature draw me : flesh of flesh. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 169 

Bone of my hone thou art ; and from thy state 
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe." * 

Bat what was it that drew my heart, by gravitation 
so strong, to my sister ? Could a child, littk above six 
years of age, place any special value upon her intellect- 
ual forwardness ? Serene and capacious as her mind 
appeared to me upon after review, was that a charm for 
stealing away the heart of an infant ? O, no ! I think of 
it now with interest, because it lends, in a stranger's ear, 
some justification to the excess of my fondness. But 
then it was lost upon me ; or, if not lost, was but dimly 
perceived. Hadst thou been an idiot, my sister, not 
the less I must have loved thee, having that capacious 
heart overflowing, even as mine overflowed, with ten- 
derness, and stung, even as mine w'as stung, by the 
necessity of being loved. This it was which crowned 
thee with beauty — 

"Love, the holy sense, 
Best gift of God, in thee was most intense." 

* Amongst the oversights in the Paradise Lost, some of which 
have not yet been perceived, it is certainly one — that, by placing 
in such overpowering light of pathos the sublime sacrifice of Adam 
to his love for his frail companion, he has too much lowered the 
guilt of his disobedience to God. All that Milton can say after- 
wards does not, and cannot, obscure the beauty of that action ; 
reviewing it calmly, we condemn, but taking the impassioned sta- 
tion of Adam at the moment of temptation, we approve in our 
hearts. This was certainly an oversight ; but it was one very dif- 
ficult to redress. I remember, amongst the many exquisite thoughts 
of John Paul (Richter), one which strikes me as particularly touch- 
ing, upon this subject. He suggests, not as any grave theological 
comment, but-ns the wandering fancy of a poetic heart, that, had 
Adam conquered the anguish of separation as a pure sacrifice of 
obedience to God, bis reward would have been the pardon and 
reconciliation of Eve, together with her restoration to innocence. 



170 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

That lamp lighted m Paradise was kindled for me 
which shone so steadily in thee ; and never but to thee 
only, never again since thy departure, durst I utter the 
feelings which possessed me. For I was the shyest of 
children; and a natural sense of personal dignity held 
me back at all stages of life, from exposing the least 
ray of feelings which I was not encouraged icholly to 
reveal. 

It would be painful, and it is needless, to pursue the 
course of that sickness which carried off my leader 
and companion. She (according to my recollection at 
this moment) was just as much above eight years as I 
above six. And perhaps this natural precedency of 
authority in judgment, and the tender humility with 
which she declined to assert it, had been amongst the 
fascinations of her presence. It was upon a Sunday 
evening, or so people fancied, that the spark of fatal 
fire fell upon that train of predispositions to a brain 
complaint which had hitherto slumbered within her. 
She had been permitted to drink tea at the house of 
a laboring man, the father of an old female servant. 
The sun had set when she returned in the company of 
this servant through meadows reeking with exhalations 
after a fervent day. From that time she sickened. 
Happily, a child in such circumstances feels no anxie- 
ties. Looking upon medical men as people whose 
natural commission it is to heal diseases, since it is 
their natural function to profess it, knowing them only 
as ex officio privileged to make war upon pain and sick- 
ness, I never had a misgiving about the result, I 
grieved, indeed, that my sister should lie in bed ; I 
grieved still more sometimes to hear her moan. But 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 171 

all this appeared to me no more than a night of trouble, 
on which the dawn w^ould soon arise. ! moment 
of darkness and delirium, when a nurse awakened me 
from that delusion, and launched God's thunderbolt 
at my heart in the assurance that my sister must die. 
Eightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it " cannot 
be remembered.^'' ^ Itself, as a remarkable thing, is 
swallowed up in its own chaos. Mere anarchy and con- 
fusion of mind fell upon me. .Deaf and blind I was, as 
I reeled under the revelation. I wish not to recall the 
circumstances of that time, when my agony was at its 
height, and hers in another sense was approaching. 
Enough to say, that all was soon over; and the morning 
of that day had at last arrived which looked down upon 
her innocent face, sleeping the sleep from which there is 
no awaking, and upon me sorrowing the sorrow for which 
there is no consolation. 

On the day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet 
temple of her brain was yet unviolated by human scru- 
tiny, I formed my own scheme for seeing her once 
more. Not for the world would I have made this 
known, nor have suffered a witness to accompany me. 
I had never heard of feelings that take the name of 
" sentimental," nor dreamed of such a possibility. But 
grief even in a child hates the light, and shrinks from 
human eyes. The house was large; there were two 
staircases; and by one of these I knew that about 
noon, when all would be quiet, I could steal up into her 
chamber. I imagine that it was exactly high noon 

* " I stood in unimaginable trance 

And agony, which cannot be remembered." 

Speech, of Alhadra, in Coleridge'' s Remorse. 



172 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

when I reached the chamber door; it was locked, but 
the key was not taken away. Entering, I closed the 
door so softly, that, although it opened upon a hall which 
ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along the 
silent walls. Then turning round, I sought my sister's 
face. But the bed had been moved, and the back was 
now turned. Nothing met my eyes but one large 
window wide open, through which the sun of midsum- 
mer at noonday was showering down torrents of splen- 
dor. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the 
blue depths seemed the express types of infinity ; and it 
was not possible for eye to behold or for heart to con- 
ceive any symbols more pathetic of life and the glory of 
life. 

Let me pause for one instant in approaching a remem- 
brance so affecting and revolutionary for my own mind, 
and one which (if any earthly remembrance) will sur- 
vive for me in the hour of death, — to remind some 
readers, and to inform others, that in the original 
Opium Confessions I endeavored to explain the reason =^ 
why death, ccBtei'is paribus, is more profoundly affect- 
ing in summer than in other parts of the year; so 
far, at least, as it is liable to any modification at all 
from accidents of scenery or season. The reason, as 
I there suggested, lies in the antagonism between the 
tropical redundancy of life in summer and the dark 
sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the 
grave we haunt with our thoughts ; the glory is around 
us, the darkness is within us. And the two coming 
into collision, each exalts the other into stronger relief. 

*Some readers will question the fact, and seek no reason. But 
did they ever suffer grief at any season of the year ? 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 173 

But in my case there was even a subtler reason why 
the summer had this intense power of vivifying the 
spectacle or the thoughts of death. And, recollecting 
it, often I have been struck with the important truth, 
that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass 
to us through perplexed combinations of concrete ob- 
jects, pass to us as inmliites (if I may coin that w^ord) 
in compound experiences incapable of being disen- 
tangled, than ever reach ns directly, and in their own 
abstract shapes. It had happened that amongst our 
nursery collection of books was the Bible illustrated 
with many pictures. And in long dark evenings, as 
my three sisters with myself sate by the firelight round 
the guard of our nursery, no book was so much in 
request amongst us. It ruled us and swayed us as 
mysteriously as music. One young nurse, whom we 
all loved, before any candle was lighted, w^ould often 
strain her eye to read it for us ; and, sometimes, 
according to her simple powers, would endeavor to 
explain what we found obscure. We, the children, 
were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness ; 
the fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by 
firelight suited our evening state of feelings; and 
they suited, also, the divine revelations of power and 
mysterious beaut}?- wdiich awed us. Above allf the 
story of a just man — man and yet not man, real 
above all things, and yet shadowy above all things, 
who had suffered the passion of death in Palestine — 
slept upon our minds like early dawn upon the waters. 
The nurse knew and explained to us the chief differ- 
ences in oriental climates; and all these differences 
(as it happens) express themselves in the great vari- 



174 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

eties of summer. The cloudless sunlights of Syria 
— those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the 
disciples plucking the ears of corn — that rmist be 
summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm Sun- 
day (a festival in the English church) troubled me 
like an anthem. " Sunday ! " what was that ? That 
was the day of peace which masked another peace 
deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. 
" Palms ! " what were they ? That was an equivo- 
cal word ; palms, in the sense of trophies, expressed 
the pomps of life; palms, as a product of nature, 
expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still even this 
explanation does not suffice ; it was not merely by the 
peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of rest 
below all rest, and of ascending glory, that I had been 
haunted. It was also because Jerusalem stood near to 
those deep images both in time and in place. The 
great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm 
Sunday came ; and the scene of that Sunday was near 
in place to Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem ? 
Did I fancy it to be the omphalos (navel) of the earth ? 
That pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, 
and once for Delphi; and both pretensions had become 
ridiculous, as the figure of the planet became known. 
Yes )• but if not of the earth, for earth's tenant, Jeru- 
salem w^as the omphalos of mortality. Yet how ? there, 
on the contrary, it was, as we infants understood, that 
mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but, 
for that very reason, there it was that mortality had 
opened its very gloomiest crater. There it was, indeed, 
that the human had risen on wings from the grave; 
but, for that reason, there also it was that the divine had 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 175 

been swallowed up by the abyss ; the lesser star could 
not rise, before the greater would submit to eclipse. 
Summer, therefore, had connected itself with death, 
not merely as a mode of antagonism, but also through 
intricate relations to scriptural scenery and events. 

Out of this digression, which was almost necessary 
for the purpose of showing how inextricably my feel- 
ings and images of death were entangled with those 
of summer, I return to the bed-chamber of my sister. 
From the gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the 
corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure ; there the 
angel face; and, as people usually fancy, it was said 
in the house that no features had suffered any change. 
Had they not? The forehead, indeed, — the serene and 
noble forehead, — Ma;^ might be the same; but the frozen 
eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath 
them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to 
palm, as if repeating the supplications of closing anguish, 
— could these be mistaken for life ? Had it been so, 
wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly lips with 
tears and never-ending kisses ? But so it was 7iot. I 
stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon 
me ; and, whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to bjow, 
— the most mournful that ear ever heard. Mournful! 
that is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept 
the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries. Many 
times since, upon a summer day, when the sun is about 
the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and 
uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but 
saintly swell : it is in this world the one sole audible 
symbol of eternity. And three times in my life I have 
happened to hear the same sound in the same circum- 



176 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

stances, namely, when standing between an open win- 
dow and a dead body on a summer day. 

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast jEolian into- 
nation, when my eye filled with the golden fulness of 
life, the pomps and glory of the heavens outside, and 
turning when it settled upon the frost which overspread 
my sister's face, instantly a trance fell upon me. A 
vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, 
a shaft which ran up forever. I, in spirit, rose as if on 
billows that also ran up the shaft forever; and the 
billows seemed to pursue the throne of God : but that 
also ran before us and fled away continually. The 
flight and the pursuit seemed to go on for ever and 
ever. Frost, gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of 
death, seemed to repel me; I slept — for how long 
I cannot say : slowly I recovered my self-possession, 
and found myself standing, as before, close to my 
sister's bed. 

0^ flight of the solitary child to the solitary God 
— flight from the ruined corpse to the throne that could 
not be ruined! — how rich wert thou in truth for after 
years! Rupture of grief that, being too mighty for a 
child to sustain, foundest a happy oblivion in a heaven- 
born dream, and within that sleep didst conceal a 
dream, whose meaning, in after years, when slowly I 
deciphered, suddenly there' flashed upon me new light ; 
and even by the grief of a child, as I will show you, 
reader, hereafter, were confounded the falsehoods of 
philosophers.t 

* ft>vyr] iiovov 7700c imvov. — Plotinus. 

■\ The thoug-hts referred to will be given in final notes; as at this 
point they seemed too much to interrupt the course of the narrative. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 177 

Tn the Opium Confessions I touched a little upon the 
extraordinary power connected with opium (after long 
use) of amplifying the dimensions of time. Space, also, 
it amplifies by degrees that are sometimes terrific. But 
time it is upon which the exalting and multiplying power 
of opium chiefly spends its operation. Time becomes 
infinitely elastic, stretching out to such immeasurable 
and vanishing termini, that it seems ridiculous to com- 
pute the sense of it, on waking, by expressions com- 
mensurate to human life. As in starry fields one 
computes by diameters of the earth's orbit, or of 
Jupiter's, so, in valuing the virtual time lived during 
some dreams, the measurement by generations is ridic- 
ulous — by millenia is ridiculous; by aeons, I should 
say, if aeons were more determinate, would be also 
ridiculous. On this single occasion, however, in my 
life, the very inverse phenomenon occurred. But why 
speak of it in connection with opium? Could a child 
of six years old have been under that influence ^ No, 
but simply because it so exactly reversed the operation 
of opium. Instead of a short interval expanding into a 
vast one, upon this occasion a long one had contracted 
into a minute. I have reason to believe that a very 
long one had elapsed during this wandering or suspen- 
sion of my perfect mind. When I returned to myself, 
there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was 
alarmed ; for I believed that, if anybody should detect 
me, means would be taken to prevent my coming 
again. Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips that I should 
kiss no more, and slunk like a guilty thing with stealthy 
steps from the room. Thus perished the vision, love- 
liest amongst all the shows which earth has revealed 
12 



178 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

to me; thus mutilated was the parting which should 
have lasted forever; thus tainted with fear was the 
farewell sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and 
perfect grief. 

O, Ahasuerus, everlasting Jew!^ fable or not a 
fable, thou when first starting on thy endless pilgrimage 
of woe, — thou when first flying through the gates of 
Jerusalem, and vainly yearning to leave the pursuing 
curse behind thee, — couldst not more certainly have read 
thy doom of sorrow in the misgivings of thy troubled 
brain than I when passing forever from my sister's 
room. The worm was at my heart; and, confining 
myself to that state of life, I may say, the worm 
that could not die. For if, when standing upon the 
threshold of manhood, I had ceased to feel its perpetual 
gnawings, that was because a vast expansion of intel- 
lect, it was because new hopes, new necessities, and 
the frenzy of youthful blood, had translated me into a 
new ceature. Man is doubtless 07ie by some subtle 
nexus that we cannot perceive, extending from the new- 
born infant to the superannuated dotard : but as regards 
many affections and passions incident to his nature at 
different stages, he is not one ; the unity of man in this 
respect is coextensive only with the particular stage to 
which the passion belongs. Some passions, as that of 
sexual love, are celestial by one half of their origin, 
animal and earthly by the other half. These will not 
survive their own appropriate stage. But love, which 
is altogether holy, like that between two children, will 

* "Everlasting' Jew ! " — der ewige Jude — which is the common 
German expression for The Wandering Jew, and sublimer even than 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 179 

revisit undoubtedly by glimpses the silence and the dark- 
ness of old age : and I repeat my belief — that, unless 
bodily torment should forbid it, that final experience in 
my sister's bed-room, or some other in which her inno- 
cence was concerned, will rise again for me, to illuminate 
the hour of death. 

On the day following this which I have recorded, 
came a body of medical men to examine the brain, and 
the particular nature of the complaint, for in some of 
its symptoms it had shown perplexing anomalies. Such 
is the sanctity of death, and especially of death alight- 
ing on an innocent child, that even gossiping people 
do not gossip on such a subject. Consequently, I knew 
nothing of the purpose which drew together these sur- 
geons, nor suspected anything of the cruel changes 
which might have been wTought in my sister's head. 
Long after this, I saw a similar case ; I surveyed the 
corpse (it was that of a beautiful boy, eighteen years old, 
who had died of the same complaint) one hour after the 
surgeons had laid the skull in ruins ; but the dishonors 
of this scrutiny were hidden by bandages, and had not 
disturbed the repose of the countenance. So it might 
have been here ; but, if it were not so, then I was 
happy in being spared the shock, from having that mar- 
ble image of peace, icy and rigid as it was, unsettled by 
disfiguring images. Some hours after the strangers had 
withdrawn, I crept again to the room ; but the door was 
now locked, the key was taken away — and I was shut 
out forever. 

Then came the funeral. I, as a point of decorum, 
was carried thither. 1 was put into a carriage with 
some gentlemen whom I did not know. They were 



180 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

kind to me ; but naturally they talked of things discon- 
nected with the occasion, and their conversation was a 
torment. At the church, I was told to hold a white 
handkerchief to my eyes. Empty hypocrisy ! What 
need had he of masques or mockeries, whose heart died 
within him at every word that was uttered ? During 
that part of the service which passed within the church, 
I made an effort to attend ; but I sank back continually 
into my own solitary darkness, and I heard little con- 
sciously, except some fugitive strains from the sublime 
chapter of St. Paul, which in England is always read 
at burials. And here I notice a profound error of our 
present illustrious laureate. When I heard those 
dreadful words, — for dreadful they were to me, — 
" It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption ; 
it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory;" such 
was the recoil of my feelings, that I could even have 
shrieked out a protesting — " 0, no, no ! " if I had 
not been restrained by the publicity of the occasion. 
In after years, reflecting upon this revolt of my feel- 
ings, which, being the voice of nature in a child, must 
be as true as any mere opinion of a child might 
probably be false, I saw, at once, the unsoundness of 
a passage in The Excursion. The book is not here,' 
but the substance I remember perfectly. Mr. Words- 
worth argues, that if it were not for the unsteady 
faith which people fix upon the beatific condition after 
death of those whom they deplore, nobody could be 
found so selfish as even secretly to wish for the re- 
storation to earth of a beloved object. A mother, for 
instance, could never dream of yearning for her child, 
and secretly calling it back by her silent aspirations 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 181 

from the arms of God, if she were but reconciled to 
the belief that really it was in those arms. But this I 
utterly deny. To take my own case, when I heard 
those dreadful words of St. Paul applied to my sis- 
ter, namely, that she should be raised a spiritual body, 
nobody can suppose that selfishness, or any other 
feeling than that of agonizing love, caused the rebel- 
lion of my heart against them. I knew already that 
she was to come again in beauty and power. I did 
not now learn this for the first time. And that thought, 
doubtless, made my sorrow sublimer ; but also it made 
it deeper. For here lay the sting of it, namely, in the 
fatal words — "We shall be changed.'' How was the 
unity of my interest in her to be preserved, if she 
were to be altered, and no longer to reflect in her 
sweet countenance the traces that were sculptured on 
my heart? Let a magician ask any woman whether 
she will permit him to improve her child, to raise it 
even from deformity to perfect beauty, if that must be 
done at the cost of its identity, and there is no loving 
mother but would reject his proposal with horror. 
Or, to take a case that has actually happened, if a 
mother were robbed of her child, at two years old, by 
gypsies, and the same child, were restored to her at 
twenty, a fine young man, but divided by a sleep as 
it were of death from all remembrances that could 
restore the broken links of their once tender connec- 
tion, — would she not feel her grief unhealed, and her 
heart defrauded ? Undoubtedly she would. All of us 
ask not of God for a better thing than that we have 
lost ; we ask for the same, even with its faults and its 
frailties. It is true that the sorrowing person will 



182 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

also be changed eventually, bat that must be by death. 
And a prospect so remote as that, and so alien from our 
present nature, cannot console us in an affliction which 
is not remote, but present — which is not spiritual, but 
human. 

Lastly came the magnificent service which the Eng- 
lish church performs at the side of the grave. There 
is exposed once again, and for the last time, the coffin. 
All eyes survey the record of name, of sex, of age, 
and the day of departure from earth, — records how 
useless ! and dropped into darkness as if messages 
addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes 
the symbolic ritual, tearing and shattering the heart 
with volleying discharges, peal after peal, from the 
final artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered into its 
home ; it has disappeared from the eye. The sacris- 
tan stands ready, with his shovel of earth and stones. 
The priest's voice is heard once more, — earth to 
earthy and the dread rattle ascends from the lid of the 
coffin; ashes to ashes, and again the killing sound is 
heard ; dust to dust, and the farewell volley announces 
that the grave — the coffin — the face are sealed up 
for ever and ever. 



0, grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing 
passions. And true it is, that thou humblest to the 
dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest 
as with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou 
sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities. 
Among the very foremost of mine was morbid sensi- 
bility to shame. And, ten years afterwards, I used to 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 183 

reproach myself with this infirmity, by supposing the 
case, that, if it were thrown upon me to seek aid for a 
perishing fellow-creature, and that I could obtain that 
aid only by facing a vast company of critical or sneering 
faces, I might, perhaps, shrink basely from the duty. 
It is true, that no such case had ever actually occurred, 
so that it was a mere romance of casuistry to tax my- 
self with cowardice so shocking. But, to feel a doubt, 
was to feel condemnation ; and the crime which onight 
have been was In my eyes the crime which had been. 
Now, however, all was changed; and for anything 
which regarded my sister's memory, in one hour I 
received a new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a 
case resembling it. I saw a ewe suddenly put off and 
abjure her own nature, in a service of love, — yes, 
slough it as completely as ever serpent sloughed his 
skin. Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from 
which all escape was hopeless, w^ithout the aid of man. 
And to a man she advanced boldly, bleating clamor- 
ously, until he followed her and rescued her beloved. 
Not less was the change in myself. Fifty thousand 
sneering faces would not have troubled me in any office 
of tenderness to my sister's memory. Ten legions 
would not have repelled me from seeking her, if there 
was a chance that she could be found. Mockery ! it 
was lost upon me. Laugh at me, as one or two people 
did ! I valued not their laughter. And when I was 
told insultingly to cease " my girlish tears," that word 
^'girlish'' had no sting for me, except as a verbal echo 
to the one eternal thought of my heart, — that a girl 
was the sweetest thing I, in my short life, had known, 
— that a cfirl it was who had crovsrned the earth with 



184 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

beauty, and had opened to my thirst fountains of pure 
celestial love, from which, in this world, I was to drink 
no more. 

Interesting it is to observe how certainly all deep 
feelings agree in this, that they seek for solitude, and 
are nursed by solitude. Deep grief, deep love, how 
naturally do these ally themselves with religious feel- 
ing ; and all three — love, grief, religion — are haunters 
of solitary places. Love, grief, the passion of reverie, 
or the mystery of devotion, — what were these, without 
solitude ? All day long, when it was not impossible 
for me to do so, I sought the most silent and seques- 
tered nooks in the grounds about the house, or in the 
neighboring fields. The awful stillness occasionall}^ of 
summer noons, when no winds were abroad, the ap- 
pealing silence of gray or misty afternoons, — these 
were fascinations as of witchcraft. Into the woods or 
the desert air I gazed, as if some comfort lay hid in 
them. I wearied the heavens with my inquest of be- 
seeching looks. I tormented the blue depths with 
obstinate scrutiny, sweeping them with my eyes, and 
searching them forever after one angelic face that 
might, perhaps, have permission to reveal itself for a 
moment. The faculty of shaping images in the dis- 
tance out of slight elements, and grouping them after 
the yearnings of the heart, aided by a slight defect in 
my eyes, grew upon me at this time. And I recall at 
the present moment one instance of that sort, which 
may show how merely shadows, or a gleam of bright- 
ness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient basis 
for this creative faculty. On Sunday mornings I was 
always taken to church : it was a church on the old 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 185 

and natural model of England, having- aisles, galleries, 
organs, all things ancient and venerable, and the pro- 
portions majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt 
through the long litany, as often as we came to that 
passage, so beautiful amongst many that are so, where 
God is supplicated on behalf of " all sick persons and 
young children," and that he would " show his pity 
upon all prisoners and captives," — I wept in secret, 
and raising my streaming eyes to the windows of the 
galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a 
spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. 
•The sides of the windows were rich with storied glass ; 
through the deep purples and crimsons streamed the 
golden light; emblazonries of heavenly illumination 
mingling with the earthly emblazonries of what is 
grandest in man. There were the apostles that had 
trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of 
celestial love to man. There were the martyrs that 
had borne witness to the truth through flames, through 
torments, and throusfh armies of fierce insultincf faces. 
There were the saints who, under intolerable pangs, 
had glorified God by meek submission to his will. 
And all the time, whilst this tumult of sublime memo- 
rials held on as the deep chords from an accompani- 
ment in the bass, I saw through the wide central field 
of the window, where the glass was uncolored, white 
fleecy clouds sailing over the azure depths of the sky ; 
were it but a fragment or a hint of such a cloud, 
immediately under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, 
it grew and shaped itself into visions of beds with white 
lawny curtails; and in the beds lay sick children, 
dying children, that were tossing in anguish, and weep- 



186 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

ing clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious 
reason, could not suddenly release them from their 
pain ; but he suffered the beds, as it seemed, to rise 
slowly through the clouds; slowly the beds ascended 
into the chambers of the air; slowly, also, his arms 
descended from the heavens, that he and his young 
children, whom in Judea, once and forever, he had 
blessed, though they imist pass slowly through the 
dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the 
sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These 
visions needed not that any sound should speak to me,' 
or music mould my feelings. The hint from the litany, 
the fragment from the clouds, — those and the storied 
windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of 
the tumultuous organ wrought its own separate crea- 
tions. And oftentimes in anthems, when the mighty 
instrument threw its vast columns of sound, fierce yet 
melodious, over the voices of the choir, — when it rose 
high in arches, as might seem, surmounting and over- 
riding the strife of the vocal parts, and gathering by 
strong coercion the total storm into unity, — sometimes 
I seemed to walk triumphantly upon those clouds which 
so recently I had looked up to as mementos of prostrate 
sorrow, and even as ministers of sorrow in its creations; 
yes, sometimes under the transfigurations of music I 
felt"^ of grief itself as a fiery chariot for mounting vic- 
toriously above the causes of grief. 

* "/ Je/.'." — The reader must not forget, in reading this and 
other passages, that, though a child's feelings are spoken of, it is 
not the child who speaks. / decipher what the child only felt in 
cipher. And so far is this distinction or this explanation from 
pointing' to anything metaphysical or doubtful, that a man must be 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 187 

I point SO often to the feelings, the ideas, or the cere- 
monies of religion, because there never yet was pro- 
found grief nor profound philosophy which did not 
inosculate at many points with profound religion. But 
I request the reader to understand, that of all things I 
was not, and could not have been, a child trained to 
talk of religion, least of all to talk of it controversially 
or polemically. Dreadful is the picture, which in books 
we sometimes find, of children discussing the doctrines 
of Christianity, and even teaching their seniors the 
boundaries and distinctions between doctrine and doc- 
trine. And it has often struck me with amazement, 
that the two things which God made most beautiful 
among his works, namely, infancy and pure religion, 
should, by the folly of man (in yoking them together 
on erroneous principles), neutralize each other's beauty, 
or even form a combination positively hateful. The 
religion becomes nonsense, and the child, becomes a 
hypocrite. The religion is transfigured into cant, and 
the innocent child into a dissembling liar.^ 

grossly unol)seivant who is not aware of what I am here noticing, 
not as a peculiarity of this child or that, but as a necessity of all 
children. Whatsoever in a man's mind blossoms and expands to 
his own consciousness in mature life, must have preexisted in germ 
during his infancy. I, for instance, did not, as a child, consciously 
read in my own deep feelings these ideas. No, not at all ; nor 
was it possible for a child to do so. I, the child, had the feel- 
ings ; I, the man, decipher them. In the child lay the handwrit- 
ing mysterious to him.; in me, the interpretation and the comment. 
* I except, however, one case, — the case of a child dying of an 
organic disorder, so, therefore, as to die slowly, and aware of its 
own condition. Because such a child is solemnized, and sometiriles, 
in a partial sense, inspired, — inspired by the depth of its suffer- 
ings, and by the awfulness of its prospect. Such a child, having put 
off the earthly mind in many things, may naturally have put off the 



ISS A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

God, be assured, takes care for the religion of chil- 
dren, wheresoever his Christianity exists. Wheresoever 
there is a national church established, to which a child 
sees his friends resorting, — wheresoever he beholds all 
whom he honors periodically prostrate before those 
illimitable heavens which fill to overflowing his young 
adoring heart, — wheresoever he sees the sleep of death 
falling at intervals upon men and women whom he 
knows, depth as confounding to the plummet of his 
mind as those heavens ascend beyond his power to 
pursue, — there take you no thought for the religion of 
a child, any more than for the lilies how they shall be 
arrayed, or for the ravens how they shall feed their 
young. 

God speaks to children, also, in dreams, and by the 
oracles that lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above 
all things, when made vocal by the truths and services 
of a national church, God holds "communion undis- 
turbed" with children. Solitude, though silent as light, 
is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is 
essential to man. All men come into this world alone ; 
all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, 
whispering consciousness, that if he should be sum- 
moned to travel into God's presence, no gentle nurse 
will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor mother to 
carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his 
trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, 

childish mind in all things. I thereby, speaking for myself only, 
acknowledge to have read with emotion a record of a little girl, 
who, knowing herself for months to be amongst the elect of death, 
became anxious, even to sickness of heart, for what she called the 
conversion of her father. Her filial duty and reverence had been 
swallowed up in filial love. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 189 

philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty 
galleries alone. The solitude, therefore, which in this 
world appals or fascinates a child's heart, is but the echo 
of a far deeper solitude through which already he has 
passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through 
which he has to pass : reflex of one solitude — prefigur- 
ation of another. 

0, burthen of solitude, that cleavest to man through 
every stage of his being ! in his birth, which has been, 
— in his life, which w, — in his death, which shall be, — 
mighty and essential solitude ! that wast, and art, and 
art to be; — thou broodest, like the spirit of God moving 
upon the surface of the deeps, over every heart that 
sleeps in the nurseries of Christendom. Like the vast 
laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be nothing, or 
less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the 
principles of all things, solitude for the child is the 
Agrippa's mirror of the unseen universe. Deep is the 
solitude in life of millions upon millions, who, with 
hearts welling forth love, have none to love them. 
Deep is the solitude of those who, with secret griefs, 
have none to pity them. Deep is the solitude of those 
who, fighting with doubts or darkness, have none to 
counsel them. But deeper than the deepest of these 
solitudes is that which broods over childhood, bringing 
before it, at intervals, the final solitude which watches 
for it, and is waiting for it within the gates of death. 
Reader, I tell you a truth, and hereafter I will convince 
you of this truth, that for a Grecian child solitude was 
nothing, but for a Christian child it has become the 
power of God and the mystery of God. 0, mighty 
and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to 



190 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

be ! thou, kindling under the torch of Christian reve- 
lations, art now transfigured forever, and hast passed 
from a blank negation into a secret hieroglyphic from 
God, shadowing in the hearts of infancy the very dim- 
mest of his truths ! 

" But you forget her,^^ says the cynic ; " yoic hap- 
pened one day to forget this sister of yours.'" Why 
not ? To cite the beautiful words of Wallenstein, — 

" What pang 
Is permanent with man ? From the highest, 
As from the vilest thing of every day, 
He learns to wean himself. For the strong hours 
Conquer him." * 

Yes, there lies the fountain of human oblivions. It 
is Time, the great conqueror, it is the " strong hours " 
whose batteries storm every passion of men. For, in 
the fine expression of Schiller, ''Was verschmerzte nicht 
der mensch 1 " What sorrow is in man that will not 
finally fret itself to sleep ? Conquering, at last, gates 
of brass, or pyramids of granite, why should it be a 
marvel to us, or a triumph to Time, that he is able to 
conquer a frail human heart ? 

However, for this once, my cynic must submit to be 
told that he is wrong. Doubtless, it is presumption in 
me to suggest that his sneers can ever go awry, any 
more than the shafts of Apollo. But still, however 
impossible such a thing is, in this one case it happens 
that they have. And when it happens that they do 
not, I will tell you, reader, why, in my opinion, it is; 
and you will see that it warrants no exultation in the 

* Death of Wallenstein, Act v. Scene 1 (Coleridge's Transla- 
tion), relating to his remembrances of the younger Piccolomini. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 191 

cynic. Kepeatedly I have heard a mother reproaching 
herself, when the birth-day revolved of the little daugh- 
ter \v1iom so suddenly she had lost, witli her own in- 
sensibility, that could so soon need a remembrancer of 
the day. But, besides that the majority of people in 
this world (as l^eing people called to labor) have no 
time left for cherishing grief by solitude and medita- 
tion, always it is proper to ask whether the memory of 
the lost person were chiefly dependent upon a visual 
image. No death is usually half so affecting as the 
death of a young child from two to five years old. 

But yet, for the same .reason which makes the grief 
more exquisite, generally for such a loss it is likely to 
be more perishable. Wherever the image, visually or 
audibly, of the lost person, is more essential to the life 
of the grief, there the grief will be more transitory. 

Faces begin soon (in Shakspeare's fine expression) 
to " dislimn ;" features fluctuate ; combinations of feature 
unsettle. Even the expression becomes a mere idea 
that you can describe to another, but not an image that 
you can reproduce for yourself. Therefore it is that 
the faces of infants, though they are divine as flowers 
in a savanna of Texas, or as the carolling of birds in a 
forest, are, like flowers in Texas, and the carolling of 
birds in a forest, soon overtaken by the pursuing 
darkness that swallows up all things human. All glo- 
ries of flesh vanish; and this, the glory of infantine 
beauty seen in the mirror of the memory, soonest of 
all. But when the departed persons worked upon your- 
self by powers that were intellectual and moral, — 
powers in the flesh, though not q/" the flesh, — the memo- 
rials in your own heart become more steadfast, if less 



192 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

affecting at the first. Now, in my sister were com- 
bined for me both graces, — the graces of childhood, and 
the graces of expanding thought. Besides that, as 
regards merely the -personal image, always the smooth 
rotundity of baby features must vanish sooner, as 
being less individual than the featuras in a child of 
eight, touched with a pensive tenderness, and exalted 
into a characteristic expression by a premature intel- 
lect. 

Rarely do things perish from my memory that are 
worth remembering. Rubbish dies instantly. Hence 
it happens that passages in Latin or English poets, 
which I never could have read but once (and that 
thirty years ago), often begin to blossom anew when 
I am lying awake, unable to sleep. I become a dis- 
tinguished compositor in the darkness : and, with my 
aerial composing-stick, sometimes I "set up" half a 
page of verses, that would be found tolerably correct 
if collated with the volume that I never had in my 
hand but once. I mention this in no spirit of boasting. 
Far from it : for, on the contrary, among my mortifica- 
tions have been compliments to my memory, when, 
in fact, any compliment that I had merited was due to 
the higher faculty of an electric aptitude for seizing 
analogies, and by means of those aerial pontoons pass- 
ing over like lightning from one topic to another. Still 
it is a fact that this pertinacious life of memory for 
things that simply touch the ear, without touching the 
consciousness, does, in fact, beset me. Said but once, 
said but softly, not marked at all, words revive before me 
in darkness and solitude ; and they arrange themselves 
gradually into sentences, but through an effort some- 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 193 

times of a distressing kind, to which I am in a manner 
forced to become a party. This being so, it was no 
great instance of that power, that three separate pas- 
sages in the funeral service, all of which but one had-' 
escaped my notice at the time, and even that one as 
to the part I am going to mention, but all of which 
must have struck on my ear, restored themselves per- 
fectly when I was lying awake in bed ; and though 
struck by their beauty, I was also incensed by what 
seemed to me the harsh sentiment expressed in two of 
these passages. I will cite all the three in an abbre- 
viated form, both for my immediate purpose, and for the 
indirect purpose of giving to those unacquainted with 
the English funeral service some specimens of its 
beauty. 

The first passage was this: "Forasmuch as it hath 
pleased Almighty God, of his great mercy, to take unto 
himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we 
therefore commit her body to the ground, earth to earth, 
ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of 
the resurrection to eternal life." ^ "^ "^ 

I pause to remark that a sublime effect arises at this 
point through a sudden rapturous interpolation from the 
Apocalypse, which, according to the rubric, " shall be 
said or sung;" but always let it be sung, and by the full 
choir : 

" I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me. Write, 
from henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the 
Lord ; even so saith the Spirit ; for they rest from their 
labors." 

The second passage, almost immediately succeeding 
to this awful burst of heavenly trumpets, and the one 
13 



194 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

which more particularly offended me, though otherwise 
even then, in my seventh year, I could not but be 
touched by its beauty, was this: — "Almighty God, 
with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence 
in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, 
after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, 
are in joy and felicity; we give thee hearty thanks that 
it hath pleased thee to deliver this our sister out of the 
miseries of this sinful world ; beseeching thee, that it 
may please thee of thy gracious goodness shortly to 
accomplish the number of thine elect, and to hasten thy 
kingdom." -^ ^ ^ ^ 

In what world was I living when a man (calling 
himself a man of God) could stand up publicly and 
give God "hearty thanks" that he had taken away 
my sister? But, young child, understand — taken her 
away from the miseries of this sinful world. yes ! 
I hear what you say; I understand that; but that 
makes no difference at all. She being gone, this world 
doubtless (as you say) is a world of unhappiness. 
But for me ubi Ccesar, ibi Roma — where my sister 
was, there was paradise; no matter whether in heaven 
above, or on the earth beneath. And he had taken her 
away, cruel priest ! of his " great mercy ! " I did not 
presume, child though I was, to think rebelliously 
against that. The reason was not any hypocritical or 
canting submission where my heart yielded none, but 
because already my deep musing intellect had per- 
ceived a mystery and a labyrinth in the economies of 
this world. God, I saw, moved not as ive moved — 
walked not as we walked — thought not as toe think. 
Still I saw no mercy to myself, a poor, frail, dependent 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 195 

creature, torn away so suddenly from the prop on 
which altogether it depended. O yes ! perhaps there 
was; and many years after I came to suspect it. 
Nevertheless it was a benignity that pointed far ahead ; 
such as by a child could not have been perceived, 
because then the great arch had not come round ; could 
not have been recognized, if it had come round ; could 
not have been valued, if it had even been dimly recog- 
nized. . 

Finally, as the closing prayer in the whole service, 
stood this, which I acknowledged then, and now ac- 
knowledge, as equally beautiful and consolatory ; for in 
this was no harsh peremptory challenge to the infirmi- 
ties of human grief, as to a thing not meriting notice in 
a religious rite. On the contrary, there was a gracious 
condescension from the great apostle to grief, as to a 
passion that he might perhaps himself have participated. 

" 0, merciful God ! the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, who is the resurrection and the life, in whom 
wh9Soever believeth shall live, though he die; who also 
taught us by his holy apostle St. Paul not to be sorry, 
as men without hope, for them that sleep in hhn ; we 
meekly beseech thee, oh Father ! to raise us from the 
death of sin unto the life of righteousness ; that, when 
we shall depart this life, we may rest in him as our hope 
is — that this our sister doth." 

Ah, that was beautiful, — that was heavenly! We 
might be sorry, we had leave to be sorry; only not 
without hope. And we were by hope to rest in Him, 
as this our sister doth. And howsoever a man may 
think that he is- without hope, I, that have read the 
writing upon these great abysses ot grief, and viewed 



196 ' A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

their shadows under the correction of mightier shadows 
from deeper abysses since then, abj^sses of aboriginal 
fear and eldest darkness, in which yet I believe that 
all hope had not absolutely died, know that he is in a 
natural error. If, for a moment, 1 and so many others, 
wallowing in the dust of affliction, could yet rise up 
suddenly like the dry corpse ^ which stood upright in 
the glory of life when touched by the bones of the 
prophet; if in those vast choral anthems, heard by my 
childish ear, the voice of God wrapt itself as in a cloud 
of music, saying — "Child, that sorrowest, I command 
thee to rise up and ascend for a season into my heaven 
of heavens," — then it was plain that despair, that the 
anguish of darkness, was not essential to such sorrow, 
but might come and go even as light comes and goes 
upon our troubled earth. 

Yes ! the light may come and go ; grief may wax 
and wane ; grief may sink ; and grief again may rise, 
as in impassioned minds oftentimes it does, even to the 
heaven of heavens ; but there is a necessity that, if 
too much left to itself in solitude, finally it will descend 
into a depth from which there is no reascent; into a 
disease which seems no disease ; into a languishing 
which, from its very sweetness, perplexes the mind, and 
is fancied to be very health. Witchcraft has seized 
upon you, — nympholepsy has struck you. Now you 
rave no more. You acquiesce; nay, you are passion- 

''^'■^ Like the dry corpse which stood upright." — See the Second 
Book of Kings, chapter xiii. v. 20 and 21. Thirty years ago this 
impressive incident was made the subject of a large altar-piece 
by Mr. Allston, an interesting American artist, then resident in 
London. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 197 

ately delighted in your condition. Sweet becomes the 
grave, because you also hope immediately to travel 
thither : luxurious is the separation, because only per- 
haps for a few weeks shall it exist for you; and it will 
then prove but the brief summer night that had retarded 
a little, by a refinement of rapture, the heavenly dawn 
of reiinion. Inevitable sometimes it is in solitude — that 
this should happen with minds morbidly meditative; 
that, when we stretch out our arms in darkness, vainly 
striving to draw back the sweet faces that have vanished, 
slowly arises a new stratagem of grief, a^nd we say, — 
" Be it that they no more come back to us, yet what hin- 
ders but we should go to them .?" 

Perilous is that crisis for the young. In its effect per- 
fectly the same as the ignoble witchcraft of the poor Af- 
rican Obeah,^ this sublimer witchcraft of grief will, if left 
to follow its own natural course, terminate in the same 
catastrophe of death. Poetry, which neglects no phe- 
nomena that are interesting to the heart of man, has 
sometimes touched a little 

"On the sublime attractions of the grave." 

* ^^ African Obeah." — Thirty years ago it would not have been 
necessary to say one word of the Obi or Obeah magic ; because at 
that time several distinguished writers (Miss Edgeworth, for in- 
stance, in her Belinda) had made use of this superstition in fic- 
tions, and because the remarkable history of Three-fingered Jack, 
a story brought upon the stage, had made the superstition notorious 
as a fact. Now, however, so long after the case has probably 
passed out of the public mind, it may be proper to mention, that 
when an Obeah man — that is, a professor of this dark collusion 
with human fears and human credulity — had once woven his dread- 
ful net of ghostly tel-rors, and had thrown it over his selected vic- 
tim, vainly did that victim flutter, struggle, languish in the meshes; 
unless the spells were reversed, he generally perished ; and with- 
out a wound, except from his own too domineering fancy. 



198 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

But you think that these attractions, existing at times 
for the adult, could not exist for the child. Understand 
that you are wrong. Understand that these attractions 
do exist for the child; and perhaps as much more 
stron-gly than they can exist for the adult, by the whole 
difference between the concentration of a childish love, 
and the inevitable distraction upon multiplied objects of 
any love that can affect any adult. There is a German 
superstition (well known by a popular translation) of the 
Erl-king's Daughter, who fixes her love upon some child, 
and seeks to wile him away into her own shadowy 
kingdom in forests. 

" Who is it that rides through the forest so fast? " 

It is a knight, who carries his child before him on 
the saddle. The Erl-king's Daughter rides on his right 
hand, and still whispers temptations to the infant audible 
only to him. 

" If thou wilt, dear baby, with me go away, 
We will see a fine show, we will play a fine play." 

The consent of the baby is essential to her success. 
And finally she does succeed. Other charms, other 
temptations, would have been requisite for me. My 
intellect was too advanced for those fascinations. But 
could the Erl-king's Daughter have revealed herself to 
me, and promised to lead me where my sister was, she 
might have wiled me by the hand into the dimmest 
forests upon earth. Languishing was my condition at 
that time. Still I languished for things "which" (a 
voice from heaven seemed to answer through my own 
heart) *' caTinot be granted;" and which, when again 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 199 

I languished, again the voice repeated, *^ cannot be 
granted." 



Well it was for me that, at this crisis, I was sum- 
moned to put on the harness of life by commencing my 
classical studies under one of my guardians, a clergyman 
of the English Church, and (so far as regarded Latin) 
a most accomplished scholar. 

At the very commencement of my new studies there 
happened an incident which afflicted me much for a short 
time, and left behind a gloomy impression, that suffering 
and wretchedness were diffused amongst all creatures that 
breathe. A person had given me a kitten. There are 
three animals which seem, beyond all others, to reflect 
the beauty of human infancy in two of its elements — 
namely, joy and guileless innocence, though less in its 
third element of simplicity, because that requires lan- 
guage for its full expression : these three animals are 
the kitten, the lamb, and the fawn. Other creatures 
may be as happy, but they do not show it so much. 
Great was the love which poor silly I had for this 
little kitten; but, as I left home at ten in the morning, 
and did not return till near five in the afternoon, I was 
obliged, with some anxiety, to throw it for those seven 
hours upon its own discretion, as infirm a basis for 
reasonable hope as could be imagined. I did not wish 
the kitten, indeed, at all less foolish than it was, ex- 
cept just when I was leaving home, and then its exceed- 
ing folly gave me a pang. Just about that timoj 
it happened that we had received, as a present from 
Leicestershire, a fine young Newfoundland dog, who 



200 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

was under a cloud of disgrace for crimes of his youth- 
ful blood committed in that county. One day he had 
taken too great a liberty with a pretty little cousin of 

mine, Emma H , about four years old. He had, in 

fact, bitten off her cheek, which, remaining attached by 
a shred, was, through the energy of a governess, re- 
placed, and subsequently healed without a scar. His 
name being Turk, he was immediately pronounced by 
the best Greek scholar of that neighborhood, inuivvfwi^ 
(that is, named significantly, or reporting his nature in 
his name). But as Miss Emma confessed to having 
been engaged in taking away a bone from him, on which 
subject no dog can be taught to understand a joke, it 
did not strike our own authorities that he was to be. 
considered in a state of reprobation ; and as our gar- 
dens (near to a great town) were, on account chiefly of 
melons, constantly robbed, it was held that a moderate 
degree of fierceness was rather a favorable trait in his 
character. My poor kitten, it was supposed, had been 
engaged in the same playful trespass upon Turk's 
property as my Leicestershire cousin, and Turk laid 
her dead on the spot. It is impossible to describe my 
grief when the case was made known to me at five 
o'clock in the evening, by a man's holding out the little 
creature dead : she that I had left so full of glorious life, 
— life which even in a kitten is infinite, — was now 
stretched in motionless repose. I remember that there 
was a large coal-stack in the yard. I dropped my Latin 
books, sat down upon a huge block of coal, and burst 
into a passion of tears. The man, struck with my 
tumultuous grief, hurried into the house ; and from 
the lower regions deployed instantly the women of the 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 201 

laundry and the kitchen. No one subject is so abso- 
lutely sacred, and enjoys so classical a sanctity among 
servant-girls, as 1. Grief; and 2. Love which is unfor- 
tunate. All the young women took me up in their 
arms and kissed me; and, last of all, an elderly woman, 
who was the cook, not only kissed me, hut wept so 
audibly, from some suggestion doubtless of grief per- 
sonal to herself, that I threw my arms about her neck 
and kissed her also. It is probable, as I now suppose, 
that some account of my grief for my sister had reached 
them. Else I was never allowed to visit their region of 
the house. But, however that might be, afterwards it 
struck me, that if I had met with so much sympathy, 
or with any sympathy at all, from the servant chiefly 
connected with myself in the desolating grief I had 
suffered, possibly I should not have been so profoundly 
shaken. 

But did I in the mean time feel anger towards Turk ? 
Not the least. And the reason was this : — My guard- 
ian, who taught me Latin, was in the habit of coming 
over and dining at my mother's table whenever he 
pleased. On these occasions, he, who like myself pitied 
dependent animals, went invariably into the yard of the 
offices, taking me with him, and unchained the dogs. 
There were two, — Grim^ a mastiff, and Turk^ our 
young friend. My guardian was a bold, athletic man, 
and delighted in dogs. He told me, which also my own 
heart told me, that these poor dogs languished out 
their lives under this confinement. The moment that I 
and my guardian {ego et rex mens) appeared in sight of 
the two kennels, it is impossible to express the joy of 
the dogs. Turk was usually restless; Grim slept away 



202 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

his life in surliness. But at the sight of us, — of my 
little insignificant self and my six-foot guardian, — both 
dogs yelled with delight. We unfastened their chains 
with our own hands, they licking our hands ; and as to 
myself, licking my miserable little face ; and at one 
bound they reentered upon their natural heritage of 
joy. Always we took them through the fields, where 
they molested nothing, and closed with giving them a 
cold bath in the brook which bounded my father's prop- 
erty. What despair must have possessed our dogs when 
they were taken back to their hateful prisons ! and I, 
for my part, not enduring to see their misery, slunk 
away when the rechaining commenced. It was in vain 
to tell me that all people, who had property out of doors 
to protect, chained up dogs in the same way. This only 
proved the extent of the oppression ; for a monstrous 
oppression it did seem, that creatures, boiling with life 
and the desires of life, should be thus detained in cap- 
tivity until they were set free by death. That liberation 
visited poor Grim and Turk sooner than any of us ex- 
pected, for they were both poisoned, within the year that 
followed, by a party of burglars. At the end of that year, 
I was reading the jEneid ; and it struck me, who remem- 
bered the howling recusancy of Turk, as a peculiarly fine 
circumstance, introduced amongst the horrors of Tar- 
tarus, that sudden gleam of powerful animals, full of life 
and conscious rights, rebelling against chains : — 

" Iraeque leonum 
Vincla recusantum." * 

* What follows, I think (for book I have none of any kind where 
this paper is proceeding), namely : et serd sub node rudentum, is 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 203 

Virgil had doubtless picked up that gem in his visits at 
feeding-titne to the cavecB of the Roman amphitheatre. 
But the rights of brute creatures to a merciful forbear- 
ance on the part of "man could not enter into the 
feeblest conceptions of one belonging to a nation that 
(although too noble to be wantonly cruel) yet in the 
same amphitheatre manifested so little regard even to 
human rights. Under Christianity the condition of 
the brute has improved, and will improve much more. 
There is ample room. For, I am sorry to say, that the 
commonest vice of Christian children, too often surveyed 
with careless eyes by mothers that in their human rela- 
tions are full of kindness, is cruelty to the inferior crea- 
tures thrown upon their mercy. For my own part, 
what had formed the ground-work of my happiness 
(since joyous was my nature, though overspread with 
a cloud of sadness) had been from the first a heart 
overflowing with love. And I had drunk in too pro- 
foundly the spirit of Christianity from our many nursery 
readings, not to read also in its divine words the justi- 
fication of my own tendencies. That which I desired 
was the thing which 1 ought to desire; the mercy that 
1 loved was the mercy that God had blessed. From 
the Sermon on the Mount resounded forever in my 
ears — "Blessed are the merciful!" I needed not to 
add — " For they shall obtain mercy." By lips so holy, 
and when standing in the atmosphere of truths so divine, 
simply to have been blessed — that was a sufficient rati- 
fication ; every truth so revealed, and so hallowed by 

probably a mistake of Virgil's ; the lions did not roar because 
night was approaching, but because night brought with it th^ir 
principal meal, and consequently the impatience of hunger. 



204 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

position, starts into sudden life, and becomes to itself 
its own authentication, needing no proof to convince, — 
needing no promise to allure. 

It may well be supposed,* therefore, that having 
so early awakened within me what may be philosoph- 
ically called the transcendental justice of Christianity, 
I blamed not Turk for yielding to the coercion of his 
nature. He had killed the object of my love. But, 
besides that he \vas under the constraint of a primary 
appetite, Turk was himself the victim of a killing 
oppression. He was doomed to a fretful existence so 
long as he should exist at all. Nothing could reconcile 
this to my benignity, which at that time rested upon 
two pillars, — upon the deep, deep heart which God had 
given to me at my birth, and upon exquisite health. 
Up to the age of two, and almost through that entire 
space of twenty-four months, I had suffered from ague ; 
but when that left me, all germs and traces of ill 
health fled away forever, except only such (and those 
how curable !) as I inherited from my school-boy dis- 
tresses in London, or had created by means of opium. 
Even the long ague was not without ministrations of 
favor to my prevailing temper; and, on the whole, no 
subject for pity, since naturally it won for me the sweet 
caresses of female tenderness, both young and old. I 
was a little petted ; but you see by this time, reader, 
that I must have been too much of a philosopher, 
even in the year one ab urbe condita of my frail 
earthly tenement, to abuse such indulgence. It also 
won for me a ride on horseback whenever the weather 
permitted. I was placed on a pillow, in front ol» a 
cankered old man, upon a large white horse, not so 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 205 

young as I was, but still showing traces of blood. 
And even the old man, who was both the oldest and 
the worst of the three, talked with gentleness to 
myself, reserving his surliness for all the rest of the 
world. 

These things pressed with a gracious power of incu- 
bation upon my predispositions ; and in my overflowing 
love I did things fitted to make the reader laugh, and 
sometimes fitted to bring myself into perplexity. One 
instance from a thousand may illustrate the combi- 
nation of both effects. At four years old, I had repeat- 
edly seen the housemaid raising her long broom, and 
pursuing (generally destroying) a vagrant spider. The 
holiness of all life, in my eyes, forced me to devise 
plots for saving the poor doomed wretch ; and think- 
ing intercession likely to prove useless, my policy 
was, to draw off the housemaid on pretence of show- 
ing her a picture, until the spider, already en route^ 
should have had time to escape. Very soon, however, 
the shrewd housemaid, marking the coincidence of 
these picture exhibitions with the agonies of fugitive 
spiders, detected my stratagem ; so that, if the reader 
will pardon an expression borrowed from the street, 
henceforwards the picture was " no go." However, as 
she approved of my motive, she told me of the many 
murders that the spider had committed, and next 
(which was worse) of the many that he certainly laoidd 
commit, if reprieved. This staggered me. I could 
have gladly forgiven the past ; but it did seem a false 
mercy to spare one spider in order to scatter death 
amongst fifty -flies. I thought timidly, for a moment, 
of suggesting that people sometimes repented, and that 



206 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

he might repent ; but I checked myself, on considering 
that I had never read any account, and that she might 
laugh at the idea, of a penitent spider. To desist was a 
necessity, in these circumstances. But the difficulty 
which the housemaid had suggested did not depart; 
it troubled my musing mind to perceive that the wel- 
fare of one creature might stand upon the ruin of 
another; and the case of the spider remained thence- 
forwards even more perplexing to my understanding 
than it was painful to my heart. 

The reader is likely to differ from me upon the ques- 
tion, moved by recurring to such experiences of child- 
hood, whether much value attaches to the perceptions 
and intellectual glimpses of a child. Children, like 
men, range through a gamut that is infinite, of tem- 
peraments and characters, ascending from the very 
dust below our feet to ^highest heaven. I have seen 
children that were sensual, brutal, devilish. But, 
thanks be to the vis medicatrix of human nature, and 
to the goodness of God, these are as rare exhibitions 
as all other monsters. People thought, when seeing 
such odious travesties and burlesques upon lovely 
human infancy, that perhaps the little wretches might 
be kilcrops.^ Yet, possibly (it has since occurred to 
me), even these children of the fiend, as they seemed, 
might have one chord in their horrible natures that 
answered to the call of some sublime purpose. There 
is a mimic instance of this kind, often found amongst 
ourselves in natures that are not really " horrible," but 

* " Kilcrops." — See, amongst Soulhey's early poems, one upon 
this superstition. Southey argues contra; but, for my part, I 
should have been more disposed to hold a brief on the other side. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 207 

which seem such to persons viewing them from a 
station not sufficiently central : — Always there are 
mischievous boys in a neighborhood, — boys who tie 
canisters to the tails of cats belonging to ladies, — a 
thing which greatly I disapprove ; and who rob orchards, 
— a thing which slightly I disapprove; and, behold! 
the next day, on meeting the injured ladies, they say to 
me, " 0, my dear friend, never pretend to argue for 
him ! This boy, we shall all see, will come to be 
hanged." Well, that seems a disagreeable prospect 
for all parties ; so I change the subject ; and, lo ! five 
years later, there is an English frigate fighting with a 
frigate of heavier metal (no matter of what nation). 
The noble captain has manoeuvred as only his coun- 
trymen can manoeuvre ; he has delivered his broad- 
sides as only the proud islanders can deliver them. 
Suddenly he sees the opening for a coup-de-main; 
through his speaking-trumpet he shouts, " Where are 
my boarders ? " And instantly rise upon the deck, 
with the gayety of boyhood, in white shirt-sleeves 
bound with black ribands, fifty men, the elite of the 
crew; and, behold! at the very head of them, cutlass 
in hand, is our friend, the tier of canisters to the tails 
of ladies' cats, — a thing which greatly I disapprove, 
and also the robber of orchards, — a thing which slightly 
I disapprove. But here is a man that will not suffer 
you either greatly or slightly to disapprove him. Fire 
celestial burns in his eye; his nation — his glorious 
nation — is in his mind ; himself he regards no more 
than the life of a cat, or the ruin of a canister. On 
the deck of the^enemy he throws himself with rapture ; 
and if he is amongst the killed, — if he, for an object so 



208 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

gloriously unselfish, lays down with joy his life and 
glittering youth, — mark this, that, perhaps, he will not 
be the least in heaven. 

But coming back to the case of childhood, I maintain 
steadfastly that into all the elementary feelings of man 
children look with more searching gaze than adults. 
My opinion is, that where circumstances favor, where 
the heart is deep, where humility and tenderness exist 
in strength, where the situation is favorable as to soli- 
tude and as to genial feelings, children have a specific 
power of contemplating the truth, which departs as 
they enter the world. It is clear to me, that children, 
upon elementary paths which require no knowledge 
of the world to unravel, tread more firmly than men ; 
have a more pathetic sense of the beauty which lies 
in justice; and, according to the immortal ode of our 
great laureate [ode " On the Intimations of Immortality 
in Childhood"], a far closer communion with God. I, 
if you observe, do not much intermeddle with religion, 
properly so called. My path lies on the interspace 
between religion and philosophy, that connects them 
both. Yet here, for once, I shall trespass on grounds 
not properly mine, and desire you to observe in St. 
Matthew, chapter xxi., and verse 15, who were those 
that, crying in the temple, made the first public recog- 
nition of Christianity. Then, if you say, " 0, but 
children echo what they hear, and are no independent 
authorities ! " I must request you to extend your read- 
ing into verse 16, where you will find that the testi- 
mony of these children, as bearing an original value, 
was ratified by the highest testimony ; and the recog- 
nition of these children did itself receive a heavenly 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 209 

recognition. And this could not have been, unless there 
were children in Jerusalem who saw into truth with a 
far sharper eye than Sanhedrims and Rabbis. 

It is impossible, with respect to any memorable grief, 
that it can be adequately exhibited so as to indicate 
the enormity of tlie convulsion which really it caused, 
without viewing it under a variety of aspects, — a thing 
which is here almost necessary for the effect of propor- 
tion to what follows: 1st, for instance, in its immediate 
pressure, so stunning and confounding; 2dly, in its 
oscillations, as in its earlier agitations, frantic with 
tumults, that borrow the wings of the winds ; or in its 
diseased impulses of sick languishing desire, through 
which sorrow transforms itself to a sunny angel, that 
beckons us to a sweet repose. These phases of revolv- 
ing affection I have already sketched. And I shall 
also sketch a third, that is, where the affliction, seem- 
ingly hushing itself to sleep, suddenly soars upwards 
again upon combining with another mode of sorrow, 
namely, anxiety without definite limits, and the trouble 
of a reproaching conscience. As sometimes,"^ upon the 
English lakes, water-fowl that have careered in the air 
until the eye is wearied .with the eternal wheelings of 
their inimitable flight — Grecian simplicities of motion, 
amidst a labyrinthine infinity of curves that would 
baffle the geometry of Apollonius — seek the water at 
last, as if with sotne settled purpose (you imagine) of 
reposing. Ah, how little have you understood the 

* In this place I derive my fecliiicr pjirlly from a lovely sketch 
of the appearance, in verse, by Mr. Wordsworth; partly from my 
own experience of. the case ; and, not having the poems here, I 
know not how to proportion my acknowledgments. 

14 



210 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

omnipotence of tliat life which they inherit ! They 
want no rest: they laugh at resting; all is "make 
believe," as when an infant hides its laughing face 
behind its mother's shawl. For a moment it is still. 
Is it meaning to rest ? Will its impatient heart endure 
to lurk there for long ? Ask, rather, if a cataract will 
stop from fatigue. Will a sunbeam sleep on its travels ? 
or the Atlantic rest from its labors ? As little can the 
infant, as little can the water-fowl of the lakes, suspend 
their play, except as a variety of play, or rest unless 
when nature compels them. Suddenly starts off the 
infant, suddenly ascend the birds, to new evolutions 
as incalculable as the caprices of a kaleidoscope ; and 
the glory of their motions, from the mixed immortalities 
of beauty and inexhaustible variety, becomes at least 
pathetic to survey. So also, and with such life of 
variation, do the primary convulsions of nature — such, 
perhaps, as only primary'^ formations in the human 
system can experience — come round again and again by 
reverberating shocks. 

* " And so, then," the cynic objects, "you rank your own mind 
(and you tell us so frankly) amongst the primary formations'?" 
As I love to annoy him, it would give me pleasure to reply — 
"Perhaps I do." But as I never answer more questions than are 
necessary, I confine myself to saying, that this is not a necessary 
construction of the words. Some minds stand nearer to the 
type of the original nature in man, are truer than others to the 
great magnet in our dark planet. Minds that are impassioned 
on a more colossal scale than ordinary, deeper in their vibrations, 
and more extensive in the scale of their vibrations, whether, 
in other parts of their intellectual system, they had or had not 
a corresponding compass, will tremble to greater depths from a 
fearful convulsion, and will come round by a longer curve of 
undulations. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 211 

The new intercourse with my guardian, and the 
changes of scene which naturally it led to, were of 
use in weaning my mind from the mere disease which 
threatened it in case I had been left any longer to my 
total solitude. But out of these changes grew an 
incident which restored my grief, though in a more 
troubled shape, and now for the first time associated 
with something like remorse and deadly anxiety. I 
can safely say that this was my earliest trespass, and 
perhaps a venial one, all things considered. Nobody 
ever discovered it; and but for my own frankness it 
would not be known to this day. But that I could not 
know ; and for years, — that is, from seven or earlier up 
to ten, — such was my simplicity, that I lived in constant 
terror. This, though it revived my grief, did me 
probably great service ; because it was no longer a state 
of languishing desire tending to torpor, but of feverish 
irritation and gnawing care, that kept alive the activity 
of my understanding. The case was this: — It hap- 
pened that I had now, and commencing with my first 
introduction to Latin studies, a large weekly allowance 
of pocket-money, — too large for my age, but safely 
intrusted to myself, who never spent or desired to 
spend one fraction of it upon anything but books. But 
all proved too little for my colossal schemes. Had the 
Vatican, the Bodleian, and the BihliotMffie du Roi, 
been all emptied into one collection for my private 
gratification, little progress would have been made 
towards content in this particular craving. Very soon 
I had run ahead of my allowance, and was about 
three guineas deep in debt. There I paused ; for deep 
anxiety now began to oppress me as to the course in 



212 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

which this mysterious (and indeed gaiUy) current of 
debt would finally flow. For tke present it was frozen 
up ; but I had some reason for thinking that Christmas 
thawed all debts whatsoever, and set them in motion 
towards innumerable pockets. Now my debt would be 
thawed with all the rest; and in what direction would 
it flow ? There was no river that would carry it off' to 
sea ; to somebody's pocket it would beyond a doubt 
make its way ; and who was that somebody ? This 
question haunted me forever. Christmas had come, 
Christmas had gone, and I heard nothing of the three 
guineas. But I was not easier for that. Far rather I 
would have heard of it; for this indefinite approach of 
a loitering catastrophe gnawed and fretted my feelings. 
No Grecian audience ever waited with more shudder- 
ing horror for the anagnorisis^ of the (Edipus, than I 
for the explosion of my debt. Had I been less igno- 
rant, I should have proposed to mortgage my weekly 
allowance for the debt, or to form a sinking fund for 
redeeming it; for the weekly sum was nearly five per 
cent, on the entire debt. But I had a mysterious awe 
of ever alluding to it. This arose from my want of 
some confidential friend ; whilst my grief pointed con- 
tinually to the remembrance, that so it had not always 
been. But was not the bookseller to blame in suffer- 
ing a child scarcely seven years old to contract such 
a debt ? Not in the least. He was both a rich man, 



* That is (as on account of English readers is added), the recog- 
nition of his true identity, which, in one moment, and by a horrid 
flash of revelation, connects him with acts incestuous, murderous, 
parricidal in the past, and with a mysterious fatality of woe lurk- 
ing in the future. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 213 

who could not possibly care for my trifling custom, 
and notoriously an honorable man. Indeed, the money 
which I myself spent every week in books would 
reasonably have caused him to presume that so small 
a sum as three guineas might well be authorized by my 
family. He stood, however, on plainer ground ; for 
my guardian, who was very indolent (as people chose 
to call it), — that is, like his little melancholy ward, 
spent all his time in reading, — often enough would send 
me to the bookseller's with a written order for books. 
This was to prevent my forgetting. But when he 
found that such a thing as " forgetting," in the case of 
a book, was wholly out of the question for me, the 
trouble of writing was dismissed. And thus I had 
become factor-general, on the part of my guardian, 
both for his books, and for such as were wanted on my 
own account, in the natural course of my education. 
My private "little account" had therefore in fact flowed 
homewards at Christmas, not (as I anticipated) in the 
shape of an independent current, but as a little tributary 
rill, that was lost in the waters of some more import- 
ant river. This I now know, but could not then have 
known with any certainty. So far, however, the affair 
would gradually have sunk out of my anxieties, as time 
wore on. But there was another item in the case, 
which, from the excess of my ignorance, preyed upon 
my spirits far more keenly; and this, keeping itself 
alive, kept also the other incident alive. With respect 
to the debt, I was not so ignorant as to think it of much 
danger by the mere amount, — my own allowance fur- 
nished a scale for preventing that mistake ; — it was the 
principle, — the having presumed to contract debts on 



214 A SEQUEL TO THE COiNFESSIOJNS 

iTiy own account, — that I feared to have exposed. But 
this other case was a ground for anxiety, even as 
regarded the amount ; not really, but under the jesting 
representation made to me, which I (as ever before and 
after) swallowed in perfect faith. Amongst the books 
which I had bought, all English, was a history of 
Great Britain, commencing, of course, with Brutus and 
a thousand years of impossibilities ; these fables being 
generously thrown in as a little gratuitous extra to the 
mass of truths which were to follow. This was to be 
completed in sixty or eighty parts, I believe. But 
there was another work left more indefinite as to its 
ultimate extent, and which, from its nature, seemed to 
imply a far higher range. It was a general history of 
navigation, supported by a vast body of voyages. Now, 
when I considered with myself what a huge thing the 
sea was, and that so many thousands of captains, com- 
modores, admirals, were eternally running up and down 
it, and scoring lines upon its face so rankl}^, that in 
some of the main "streets" and "squares" (as one 
might call them), their tracts would blend into one 
undistinofuishable blot, I beran to fear that such a 
work tended to infinity. What was little England to 
the universal sea ? And yet that went perhaps to 
fourscore parts. Not enduring the uncertainty that now 
besieged my tranquillity, I resolved to know the worst; 
and, on a day ever memorable to me, I went down to 
the bookseller's. He was a mild, elderly man, and to 
myself had always shown a kind, indulgent manner. 
Partly, perhaps, he had been struck by my extreme 
gravity } and partly, during the many conversations I 
had with him, on occasion of my guardian's orders for 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 215 

books, with my laughable simplicity. But there was 
another reason which had early won for me his paternal 
reg^ard. For the first three or four months I had found 
Latin something of a drudgery ; and the incident which 
forever knocked away the " shores," at that time pre- 
venting my launch upon the general bosom of Latin 
literature, was this: — One day, the bookseller took 
down a Beza's Lathi Testament; and, opening it, 
asked me to translate for him the chapter which he 
pointed to. I was struck by perceiving that it was 
the great chapter of St. Paul on the grave and resur- 
rection. I had never seen a Latin version; yet, from 
the simplicity of the scriptural style in aiiy translation 
(though Beza's is far from good), I could not well have 
failed in construing. But, as it happened to be this par- 
ticular chapter, which in English I had read again and 
again with so passionate a sense of its grandeur, I read 
it off with a fluency and effect like some great opera 
singer uttering a rapturous bravura. My kind old 
friend expressed himself gratified, making me a present 
of the book as a mark of his approbation. And it is 
remarkable, that from this moment, when the deep 
memory of the English words had forced me into 
seeing the precise correspondence of the two concurrent 
streams, — Latin and English, — never again did any 
difficulty arise to check the velocity of my progress in 
this particular language. At less than elev^en years 
of age, when as yet I was a very indifferent Grecian, 
I had become a brilliant master of Latinity, as my 
alcaics and choriambics remain to testify ; and the 
whole occasion of a change so memorable to a boy, 
was this casual summons to translate a composition 



216 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

with which my heart was filled. Ever after this, he 
showed me a caressing kindness, and so condescend- 
ingly, that, generally, he would leave any people, for a 
moment, with whom he was engaged, to come and speak 
to me. On this fatal day, however, — for such it proved 
to me, — he could not do this. He saw me, indeed, and 
nodded, but could not leave a party of elderly strangers. 
This accident threw me unavoidably upon one of his 
young people. Now, this was a market day, and there 
was a press of country people present, whom I did not 
wish to hear my question. Never did a human crea- 
ture, with his heart palpitating at Delphi for the solution 
of some killing mystery, stand before the priestess of 
the oracle, with lips that moved more sadly than mine, 
when now advancing to a smiling young man at a desk. 
His answer was to decide, though I could not exactly 
know that, whether, for the next two years, I was to 
have an hour of peace. He was a handsome, good- 
natured young man, but full of fun and frolic; and I 
dare say was amused with what must have seemed to 
him the absurd anxiety of my features. I described 
the work to him, and he understood me at once. How 
many volumes did he think it would extend to ? 
There was a whimsical expression, perhaps, of droll- 
ery about his eyes, but which, unhappily, under my 
preconceptions, I translated into scorn, as he replied, 
*'Ho\v many volumes? O! really, I can't say; may- 
be ay matter of 15,000, be the same more or less." 
"ilfore.^" I said, in horror, altogether neglecting the 
contingency of " less." " Why," he said, " we can't 
settle these things to a nicety. But, considering the 
subject " [ay, that was the very thing which I myself 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 217 

considered], " I should say there might be some trifle 
over, as suppose 400 or 500 volumes, be the satfe 
more or less." What, then, — here there might be 
supplements to supplements, — the work might posi- 
tively never end ! On one pretence or another, if an 
author or publisher might add 500 volumes, he might 
add another round 15,000. Indeed, it strikes one even 
now, that by the time all the one-legged commodores 
and yellow admirals of that generation had exhausted 
their long yarns, another generation would have grown 
another crop of the same gallant spinners. I asked no 
more, but slunk out of the shop, and never again 
entered it with cheerfulness, or propounded any frank 
questions, as heretofore.. For I was now seriously 
afraid of pointing attention to myself as one that, by 
having purchased some numbers, and obtained others 
on credit, had silently contracted an engagement to 
take all the rest, though they should stretch to the 
crack of doom. Certainly I had never heard of a work 
that extended to 15,000 volumes; but still there was no 
natural impossibility that it should; and, if in any case, 
in none so reasonably as one upon the inexhaustible 
sea. Besides, any slight mistake as to the letter of 
the number could not affect the horror of the final 
prospect. I saw by the imprint, and I heard, that this 
work emanated from London, a vast centre of mystery 
to me, and the more so, as a thing unseen at any time 
by my eyes, and nearly two hundred miles distant. I 
felt the fatal truth, that here was a ghostly cobweb radi- 
ating into all the provinces from the mighty metropolis. 
I secretly had trodden upon the outer circumference, — 
had damaged or deranged the fine threads or links, — 



218 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

concealment or reparation there could be none. Slowly 
ptrhaps, but surely, the vibration would travel back 
to London. The ancient spider that sat there at the 
centre would rush along the net-work through all longi- 
tudes and latitudes, until he found the* responsible 
caitiff, author of so much mischief. Even with less 
ignorance than mine, there ivas something to appal a 
child's imagination in the vast systematic machinery 
by which any elaborate work could disperse itself, could 
levy money, could put questions and get answers,- — 
all in profound silence, nay, even in darkness, search- 
ing every nook of every town and of every hamlet in 
so populous a kingdom. I had some dim terrors, also, 
connected with the Stationers' Company. I had often 
observed them in popular works threatening unknown 
men with unknown chastisements, for offences equally 
unknown ; nay, to myself, absolutely inconceivable. 
Could I be the mysterious criminal so long pointed out, 
as it were, in prophecy ? I figured the stationers, doubt- 
less all powerful men, pulling at one rope, and my 
unhappy self hanging at the other end. But an image, 
which seems now even more ludicrous than the rest, at 
that time, was the one most connected with tlfe revival 
of my grief. It occurred to my subtlety, that the Sta- 
tioners' Company, or any other company, could not 
possibly demand the money until they had delivered the 
volumes. And, as no man could say that I had ever 
positively refused to receive them, they would have no 
pretence for not accomplishing this delivery in a civil 
manner. Unless I should turn out to be no customer 
at all, at present it was clear that I had a right to be 
considered a most excellent customer ; one, in fact, 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 219 

who had given an order for fifteen thousand volumes. 
Then rose up before me this great opera-house 
"scena" of the delivery. There would be a ring at 
the front door. A wagoner in the front, with a bland 
voice, would ask for " a young gentleman who had 
given an order to their house." Looking out, I should 
perceiv^e a procession of carts and wagons, all advanc- 
ing in measured movements ; each in turn would pre- 
sent its rear, deliver its cargo of volumes, by shooting 
them, like a load of coals, on the lawn, and wheel off to 
the rear, by way of clearing the road for its successors. 
Then the impossibility of even asking the servants to 
cover with sheets, or counterpanes, or table-cloths, such 
a mountainous, such a *' star-y -pointing " record of my 
past offences, lying in so conspicuous a situation ! Men 
would not know my guilt merely, they would see it. 
But the reason why this form of the consequences, so 
much more than any other, stuck by my imagination 
was, that it connected itself with one of the Arabian 
Nights which had partidularly interested myself and 
my sister. It was that tale, where a young porter, 
having his ropes about his person, had stumbled into 
the special " preserve " of some old magician. He 
finds a beautiful lady imprisoned, to whom (and not 
without prospects of success) he recommends himself 
as a suitor more in harmony with her own years than 
a withered magician. At this crisis, the magician 
returns. The young man bolts, and for that day 
successfully; but unluckily he leaves his ropes behind. 
Next morning he hears the magician, too honest by 
half, inquiring- at the front door, with much expression 
of condolence, for the unfortunate young man who had 



220 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

lost his ropes in his own zenana. Upon this story 
I used to amuse my sister by ventriloquizing to the 
magician, from the lips of the trembling young man, — 
" 0, Mr. Magician, these ropes cannot be mine ! They 
are far too good ; and one would n't like, you know, to 
rob some other poor young man. If you please, Mr. 
Magician, I never had money enough to buy so beauti- 
ful a set of ropes." But argument is thrown away 
upon a magician, and off he sets on his travels with the 
young porter, not forgetting to take the ropes along with 
him. 

Here now was the case, that had once seemed so 
impressive to me in a mere fiction from a far distant 
age and land, literally reproduced in myself. For, 
what did it matter whether a magician dunned one 
with old ropes for his engine of torture, or Stationers' 
Hall with fifteen thousand volumes (in the rear of which 
there might also be ropes) ? Should / have ventrilo- 
quized, would my sister have laughed, had either of us 
but guessed the possibility that I myself, and within one 
twelve months, and, alas ! standing alone in the world 
as regarded confidential counsel, should repeat within 
my own inner experience the shadowy panic of the 
young Bagdat intruder upon the privacy of magicians ? 
It appeared, then, that I had been reading a legend 
concerning myself in the Arabian Nights. I had been 
contemplated in types a thousand years before, on the 
banks of the Tigris. It was horror and grief that 
prompted that thought. 

O, heavens ! that the misery of a child should by 
possibility become the laughter of adults! — that even 
I, the sufferer, should be capable of amusing myself, 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 221 

as if it had been a jest, with what for three years had 
constituted the secret affliction of my life, and its eter- 
nal trepidation — like the ticking of a death-watch to 
patients lying awake in the plague ! I durst ask no 
counsel ; there was no one to ask. Possibly my sister 
could have given me none in a case w^hich neither of 
us should have understood, and where to seek for inform- 
ation from others would have been at once to betray 
the whole reason for seeking it. But, if no advice, she 
would have given me her pity, and the expression of 
her endless love; and, with the relief of sympathy, 
that heals for a season all distresses, she would have 
given me that exquisite luxury — the knowledge that, 
having parted with my secret, yet also I had not parted 
with it, since it was in the power only of one that could 
much less betray me than I could betray myself. At 
this time, — that is, about the year when I suffered 
most, — I was reading Caesar. 0, laurelled scholar, 
sunbright intellect, " foremost man of all this world," 
how often did I make out of thy immortal volume a pil- 
low to support my wearied brow, as at evening, on my 
homeward road, I used to turn into some silent field, 
where I might give way unobserved to the reveries 
which besieged me ! 1 wondered, and found no end 
of wondering, at the revolution that one short year had 
made in my happiness. I wondered that such billows 
could overtake me. At the beginning of that year, how 
radiantly happy ! At the end, how insupportably alone ! 

" Into what depth thou seest, 
From what height fallen." 

Forever I searched the abysses with some w^andering 



222 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

thoughts unintelligible to myself. Forever I dallied 
with some obscure notion, how my sister's love might be 
made in some dim way available for delivering me from 
misery; or else how the misery I had suffered and was' 
suffering might be made, in some way equally dim, the 
ransom for winning back her love. 



Here pause, reader ! Imagine yourself seated in 
some cloud-scaling swing, oscillating under the impulse 
of lunatic hands; for the strength of lunacy may belong 
to human dreams, the fearful caprice of lunacy, and the 
malice of lunacy, whilst the victim of those dreams 
may be all the more certainly removed from lunacy ; 
even as a bridge gathers cohesion and strength from 
the increasing resistance into which it is forced by 
increasing pressure. Seated in such a swing, fast as 
you reach the lowest point of depression, may you 
rely on racing up to a starry altitude of corresponding 
ascent. Ups and downs you will see, heights and 
depths, in our fiery course together, such as will some- 
times tempt you to look shyly and suspiciously at me, 
your guide, and the ruler of the oscillations. Here, at 
the point where I have called a halt, the reader has 
reached the lowest depths in my nursery afflictions. 
From that point, according to the principles of art 
which govern the movement of these Confessions, I 
had meant to launch him upwards through the whole 
arch of ascending visions which seemed requisite to 
balance the sweep downwards, so recently described in 
his course. But accidents of the press have made it 
impossible to accomplish this purpose in the present 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATEE. . 223 

month's journal. There is reason to regret that the 
advantages of position, which were essential to the full 
effect of passages planned for the equipoise and mutual 
resistance, have thus been lost. Meantime, upon the 
principle of the mariner, who rigs a jury-mast in default 
of his regular spars, I find my resource in a sort of 
"jury" peroration, not sufficient in the way of a balance 
by its proportio?is, but sufficient to indicate the quality 
of the balance w^hich I had contemplated. He who has 
really read the preceding parts of these present Confes- 
sions will be aware that a stricter scrutiny of the past, 
such as was natural after the whole economy of the 
dreaming faculty had been Qonvulsed beyond all prece- 
dents on record, led me to the conviction that not one 
agency, but two agencies, had cooperated to the tremen- 
dous result. The nursery experience had been the ally 
and the natural coefficient of the opium. For that 
reason it was that the nursery experience has been nar- 
rated. Logically it bears the very same relation to the 
convulsions of the dreaming faculty as the opium. The 
idealizing tendency existed in the dream-theatre of my 
childhood ; but the preternatural strength of its action 
and coloring was first developed after the confluence 
of the tioo causes. The reader must suppose me at 
Oxford ; twelve years and a half are gone by ; I am in 
the glory of youthful happiness : but I have now first 
tampered with opium ; and now first the agitations of 
my childhood reopened in strength, now first they swept 
in upon the brain with power, and the grandeur of recov- 
ered life, under the separate and the concurring inspira- 
tions of opium. ^ 

Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery 



224 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

of my childhood expanded before me : my sister was 
moaning in bed; I was beginning to be restless with 
fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the nurse, 
but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon 
some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and, like 
the superb Medea standing alone with her children 
in the nursery at Corinth,^ smote me senseless to the 
ground. Again I was in the chamber with my sister's 
corpse, again the pomps of life rose up in silence, the 
glory of summer, the frost of death. Dream formed 
itself mysteriously within dream ; within these Oxford 
dreams remoulded itself continually the trance in my 
sister's chamber, — the blue heavens, the everlasting 
vault, the soaring billows, the throne steeped in the 
thought (but not the sight) of " Him that sate there- 
on;" the flight, the pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of 
my return to earth. Once more the funeral procession 
gathered; the priest in his white surplice stood wait- 
ing with a book in his hand by the side of an open 
grave, the sacristan with his shovel; the coffin sank; 
the dust to dust descended. Again I was in the church 
on a heavenly Sunday morning. The golden sunlight 
of God slept amongst the heads of his apostles, his 
martyrs, his saints ; the fr'agment from the litany, the 
fragment from the clouds, awoke again the lawny 
beds that went up to scale the heavens — awoke again 
the shadowy arms that moved downward to meet 
them. Once again arose the swell of the anthem, 
the burst of the Hallelujah chorus, the storm, the 
trampling movement of the choral passion, the agita- 

* Euripides. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATEK. 225 

tion of my own trembling sympathy, the tumult 
of the choir, the wrath of the organ. Once more I, 
that wallowed, became he that rose up to the clouds. 
And now in Oxford all was bound up into unity ; the 
first state and the last were melted into each other as in 
some sunny glorifying haze. For high above my own 
station hovered a gleaming host of heavenly beings, 
surrounding the pillows of the dying children. And 
such beings sympathize equally with sorrow that grovels 
and with sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the 
children that are languishing in death, and the children 
that live only to languish in tears. 



THE PALIMPSEST. 

You know perhaps, masculine reader, better than I 
can tell you, what is a Palimpsest. Possibly, you have 
one in your own librar3^ But yet, for the sake of others 
who may not know, or may have forgotten, suffer me 
to explain it here, lest any female reader, who honors 
these papers with her notice, should tax me with 
explaining it once too seldom ; which would be worse 
to bear than a simultaneous complaint from twelve 
proud men, that I bad explained it three times too often. 
You therefore, fair reader, understand, that for ymir 
accommodation exclusively, I explain the meaning of 
this word. It is Greek; and our sex enjoys the oflice 
and privilege of-standing counsel to yours, in all ques- 
tions of Greek. Wo are, under favor, perpetual and 
15 



226 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

hereditary dragomans to you. So that if, by accident, 
you know the meaning of a Greek word, yet by cour- 
tesy to US, your counsel learned in that matter, you will 
always seem 7iot to know it. 

A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of 
its manuscript by reiterated successions. 

What was the reason that the Greeks and the 
Roma^is had not the advantage of printed books ? The 
answer will be, from ninety-nine persons in a hundred, 
— Because the mystery of printing was not then dis- 
covered. But this is altogether a mistake. The secret 
of printing must have been discovered many thousands 
of times before it was used, or coiild be used. The 
inventive powers of man are divine; and also his stu- 
pidity is divine, as Cowper so playfully illustrates in the 
slow development of the sofa through successive genera- 
tions of immortal dulness. It took centuries of block- 
heads to raise a joint stool into a chair; and it required 
something like a miracle of genius, in the estimate of 
elder generations, to reveal the possibility of lengthening 
a chair into a chaise-longue, or a sofa. Yes, these were 
inventions that cost mighty throes of intellectual power. 
But still, as respects printing, and admirable as is the 
stupidity of man, it was really not quite equal to the 
task of evading an object which stared him in the face 
with so broad a gaze. It did not require an Athenian 
intellect to read the main secret of printing in many 
scores of processes which the ordinary uses of life 
were daily repeating. To say nothing of analogous 
artifices amongst various mechanic artisans, all that is 
essential in printing must have been known to every 
nation that struck coins and medals. Not, therefore. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 227 

any want of a printing art, — that is, of an art for 
multiplying impressions, — but the want of a cheap 
material for receiving such impressions, was the obstacle 
to an mtroduction of printed books, even as early as 
Pisistratus. The ancients did apply printing to records 
of silver and gold; to marble, and many other sub- 
stances cheaper than gold and silver, they did not, since 
each monument required a separate effort of inscrip- 
tion. Simply this defect it was of a cheap material for 
receiving impresses, which froze in its very fountains 
the early resources of printing. 

Some twenty years ago, this view of the case was 
luminously expounded by Dr. Whately, the present 
Archbishop of Dublin, and with the merit, I believe, of 
having first suggested it. Since then, this theory has 
received indirect confirmation. Now, out of that origi- 
nal scarcity affecting all materials proper for durable 
books, which continued up to times comparatively 
modern, grew the opening for palimpsests. Natur- 
ally, when once a roll of parchment or of vellum had 
done its office, by propagating through a series of gen- 
erations what once had possessed an interest for them, 
but which, under changes of opinion or of taste, had 
faded to their feelings or had become obsolete for their 
undertakings, the whole memhrana or vellum skin, the 
two-fold product of human skill, costly material, and 
costly freight of thought, which it carried, drooped in 
value concurrently — supposing that ea«:h were inalien- 
ably associated to the other. Once it had been the 
impress of a human mind which stamped its value upon 
the vellum; the jellum, though costly, had contributed 
but a secondary element of value to the total result. 



228 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

At length, however, this relation between the vehicle 
and its freight has gradually been undermined. The 
vellum, from having been the setting of the jewel, has 
risen at length to be the jewel itself; and the burden of 
thought, from having given the chief value to the 
vellum, has now become the chief obstacle to its value; 
nay, has totally extinguished its value, unless it can be 
dissociated from the connection. Yet, if this unlinking 
ca7i be effected, then, fast as the inscription upon the 
membrane is sinking into rubbish, the membrane itself 
is reviving in its separate importance ; and, from bearing 
a ministerial value, the vellum has come at last to absorb 
the whole value. 

Hence the importance for our ancestors that the 
separation should be effected. Hence it arose in the 
middle ages, as a considerable object for chemistry, to 
discharge the writing from the roll, and thus to make 
it available for a new succession of thoughts. The 
soil, if cleansed from what once had been hot-house 
plants, but now were held to be weeds, would be ready 
to receive a fresh and more appropriate crop. In that 
object the monkish chemist succeeded; but after a 
fashion which seems almost incredible, — incredible not 
as regards the extent of their success, but as regards 
the delicacy of restraints under which it moved, — so 
equally adjusted was their success to the immediate 
interests of that period, and to the reversionary objects 
of our own. They did the thing: but not so radically 
as to prevent us, their posterity, from wiAo'mg it. They 
expelled the writing sufficiently to leave a field for the 
new manuscript, and yet not sufficiently to make the 
traces of the elder manuscript irrecoverable for us. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUBI-EATER. 229 

Could magic, could Hermes Trismegistus, have done 
more ? What would you think, fair reader, of a prob- 
lem such as this, — to write a book which should be 
sense for your own generation, nonsense for the next, 
should revive into sense for the next after that, but 
again become nonsense for the fourth ; and so on by 
alternate successions, sinking: into nicht or blazino; into 
day, like the Sicilian river Arethusa, and the English 
river Mole; or like the undulating motions of a flat- 
tened stone which children cause to skim the breast of 
a river, now diving below the water, now grazing its 
surface, sinking heavily into darkness, rising buoyantly 
into light, through a long vista of alternations ? Such 
a problem, you say, is impossible. But really it is a 
problem not harder apparently than — to bid a genera- 
tion kill, but so that a subsequent generation may call 
back into life ; bury, but so that posterity may command 
to rise again. Yet that was what the rude chemistry 
of past ages eflfected when coming into combination 
with the reaction from the more refined chemistry of our 
own. Had they been better chemists, had ice been worse, 
the mixed result, namely, that, dying for ihem^ the 
flower should revive for 7/5, could not have been effected. 
They did the thing proposed to them: they did it effect- 
ually, for they founded upon it all that was wanted : 
and yet ineffectually, since we unravelled their work; 
effacing all above which they had superscribed; -restor- 
ing all below which they had effaced. 

Here, for instance, is a parchment which contained 
some Grecian tragedy, the Agamemnon of ^schylus, 
or the Phoenissse^ of Euripides. This had possessed a 
value almost inappreciable in the eyes of accomplished 



230 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

scholars, continually growing rarer through generations. 
But four centuries are gone by since the destruction 
of the Western Empire. Christianity, with towering 
grandeurs of another class, has founded a ditTerent 
empire; and some bigoted, yet perhaps holy monk, has 
washed away (as he persuades himself) the heathen's 
tragedy, replacing it with a monastic legend ; which 
legend is disfigured with fables in its incidents, and yet 
in a higher sense is true, because interwoVen with 
Christian morals, and with the sublimest of Christian 
revelations. Three, four, five centuries more, find man 
still devout as ever ; but the language has become 
obsolete, and even for Christian devotion a new era has 
arisen, throwing it into the channel of crusading zeal 
or of chivalrous enthusiasm. The memhrana is wanted 
now for a knightly romance — for "my Cid," or Coeur 
de Lion; for Sir Tristrem, or Lybseus Disconus. In 
this way, by means of the imperfect chemistry known 
to the mediaeval period, the same roll has served as a 
conservatory for three separate generations of flowers 
and fruits, all perfectly different, and yet all specially 
adapted to the wants of the successive possessors. 
The Greek tragedy, the monkish legend, the knightly 
romance, each has ruled its own period. One harvest 
after another has been gathered into the garners of 
man through ages far apart. And the same hydraulic 
machinery has distributed, through the same marble 
fountains, water, milk, or wine, according to the habits 
and training of the generations that came to quench 
their thirst. 

Such were the achievements of rude monastic chem- 
istry. But the more elaborate chemistry of our own 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 231 

days has reversed all these motions of our simple an- 
cestors, which results in every stage that to them 
would have realized the most fantastic amongst the 
promises of thaumaturgy. Insolent vaunt of Paracel- 
sus, that he would restore the original rose or violet out 
of the ashes settling from its combustion — that is now 
rivalled in this modern achievement. The traces of 
each successive handwriting, regularly effticed, as had 
been imagined, have, in the inverse order, been regu- 
larly called back : the footsteps of the game pursued, 
wolf or stag, in each several chase, have been un- 
linked, and hunted back through all their doubles; 
and, as the chorus of the Athenian stage unwove 
through the antistrophe every step that had been mys- 
tically woven through the strophe, so, by our modern 
conjurations of science, secrets of ages remote from 
each other have been exorcised"^ from the accumu- 
lated shadows of centuries. Chemistry, a witch as 
potent as the Erictho of Lucanto {FharsaHa, lib. vi. 
or vii.), has extorted by her torments, from the dust 
and ashes of forgotten centuries, the secrets of a life 
extinct for the general eye, but still glowing in the 
embers. Even the fable of the Phcenix, that secular 
bird, who propagated his solitary existence, and his 
solitary births, along the line of centuries, through 
eternal relays of funeral mists, is but a type of what 
we have done with Palimpsests. We have backed 

*Some readers maj' be apt to suppose, from all English experi- 
ence, that the word exorcise means properly banishment to the 
shades. Not so. Citation from the shades, or sometimes the 
torturing coercion of mystic adjurations, is more truly the primary 
sense. 



232 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

upon each phoenix in the long regressns, and forced 
him to expose his ancestral phcenix, sleeping in the 
ashes below his own ashes. Our good old forefathers 
would have been aghast at our sorceries; and, if they 
speculated on the propriety of burning Dr. Faustus, 
us they would have burned by acclamation. Trial 
there would have been none ; and they could not 
otherwise h^ve satisfied their horror of the brazen prof- 
ligacy marking our modern magic, than by ploughing 
up the houses of all who had been parties to it, and 
sowing the ground with salt. 

Fancy not, reader, that this tumult of images, illus- 
trative or allusive, moves under any impulse or pur- 
pose of mirth. It is but the coruscation of a restless 
understanding, often made ten times more so by irri- 
tation of the nerves, such as you will first learn to 
comprehend (its how and its why) some stage or two 
ahead. The image, the memorial, the record, which 
for me is derived from a palimpsest, as to one great 
fact in our human being, and which immediately I 
will show you, is but too repellent of laughter; or, 
even if laughter had been possible, it would have been 
such laughter as oftentimes is thrown off from the 
fields of ocean,^ lauo-hter that hides, or that seems to 



* '' Laiii'-Jiter from the Ji elds of ocean. -^ — Many readers ->vill 
recall, though, at the moment of writing, my own thoughts did 
not recall, the well-known passage in the Prometheus — 

TIOITK'))' TS y.t.fiaTOJV 

"O multitudinous laughter of the ocean billows!" It is not 
clear whether ^schylus contemplated the laughter as addressing 
the ear or the eye. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 233 

evade mustering- tumult ; foam-bells that weave gar- 
lands of phosphoric radiance for one moment round 
the eddies of gleaming abysses; mimicries of earth- 
born flowers that for the eye raise phantoms of gayety, 
as oftentimes for the ear they raise the echoes of fugitive 
laughter, mixing with the ravings and choir- voices of an 
angry sea. 

What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is 
the human brain ? Such a palimpsest is my brain ; such 
a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers 
of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain 
softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury 
all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has 
been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, 
lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives 
or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves 
to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque 
collisions of those successive themes, having no natural 
connection, which by pure accident have consecutively 
occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created pa- 
limpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, 
there are not and cannot be such incoherencies. The 
fleeting accidents of a man's life, and its external shows, 
may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organ- 
izing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather 
about fixed predetermined ceaitres, whatever heterogene- 
ous elements life may have accumulated from Avithout, 
will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to 
be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled, in the 
retrospect from dying moments, or from other great 
convulsions. 

Such a convulsion is the struggle of gradual sufTo- 



234 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

cation, as in drowning; and, in the original Opium 
Confessions, I mentioned a case of that nature com- 
municated to me by a lady from her own childish 
experience. The lady is still living, though now of 
unusually great age ; and I may mention that amongst 
her faults never was numbered any levity of principle, 
or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity ; but, 
on the contrary, such faults as arise from austerity, too 
harsh, perhaps, and gloomy, indulgent neither to others 
nor herself. And, at the time of relating this incident, 
when already very old, she had become religious to 
asceticism. According to my present belief, she had 
completed her ninth year, wlien, playing by the side of 
a solitary brook, she fell into one of its deepest pools. 
Eventually, but after what lapse of time nobody ever 
knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who, 
riding in some distant lane, had seen her rise to the 
surface ; but not until she had descended within the 
abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as far, per- 
haps, as ever human eye can have looked that had 
permission to return. At a certain stage of this descent, 
a blow seemed to strike her, phosphoric radiance sprang 
forth from her eyeballs ; and immediately a mighty 
theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in 
the twinkling of an eye, every act, every design of 
her past life, lived again, arraying themselves not as 
a succession, but as parts of a coexistence. Such a 
light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards 
into the shades of infancy, as the light, perhaps, which 
wrapt the destined Apostle on his road to Damascus. 
Yet that light blinded for a season ; but hers poured 
celestial vision upon the brain, so that her consciousness 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 235 

became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in 
the infinite review. 

This anecdote was treated sceptically at the time 
by some critics. But, besides that it has since been 
confirmed by other experience essentially the same, 
reported by other parties in the sam.e circumstances, 
who had never heard of each other, the true point for 
astonishment is not the simultaneity of arrangement 
under which the past events of life, though in fact 
successive, had formed their dread line of revelation. 
This was but a secondary phenomenon ; the deeper lay 
in the resurrection itself, and the possibility of resurrec- 
tion, for what had so long slept in the dust. A pall, 
deep as oblivion, had been thrown by life over every 
trace of these experiences; and yet suddenly, at a 
silent command, at the signal of a blazing rocket sent 
up from the brain, the pall draws up, and the whole 
depths of the theatre are exposed. Here was the 
greater mystery : now this mystery is liable to no doubt; 
for it is repeated, and ten thousand times repeated, by 
opium, for those who are its martyrs. 

Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious hand-writ- 
ings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves 
successively upon the palimpsest of your brain ; and, 
like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the 
undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling 
upon light, the endless strata have covered up each 
other in forgetful ness. But by the hour of death, but 
by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can 
revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping. 
In the illustration imagined by myself, from the case 
of some individual. palimpsest, the Grecian tragedy had 



236 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

seemed to be displaced, but was 7iot displaced, by the 
monkish leo-end; and the monkish les^end had seemed 
to be displaced, but was 7iot displaced, by the knightly 
romance. In some potent convulsion of the system, 
all wheels back into its earliest elementary stage. The 
bewildering romance, light tarnished with darkness, the 
semi-fabulous legend, truth celestial mixed with human 
falsehoods, these fade even of themselves, as life ad- 
vances. The romance has perished that the young 
man adored; the legend has gone that deluded the boy; 
but the deep, deep tragedies of infancy, as when the 
child's hands were unlinked forever from his mother's 
neck, or his lips forever from his sister's kisses, these 
remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last. 
Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that can 
scorch away these immortal impresses ; and the dream 
which closed the preceding section, together with the 
succeeding dreams of this (which may be viewed as 
in the nature of choruses winding up the overture 
contained in Part I.), are but ilKistrations of this truth, 
such as every man probably will meet experimentally 
who passes through similar convulsions of dreaming or 
delirium from any similar or equal disturbance in his 
nature.^ 

*This, it may be said, requires a corresponding duration of 
experience ; but, as an argument for this mysterious power lurking 
in our nature, I may remind the reader of one phenomenon open to 
the notice of everybody, namely, the tendency of very aged per- 
sons to throw back and concentrate the light of their memory upon 
scenes of early childhood, as to which they recall many traces that 
had faded even to themselres in middle life, whilst they often for- 
get altogether the whole intermediate stages of their experience. 
This shows that naturally, and without violent agencies, the 
human brain is by tendency a palimpsest. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 237 



LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW. 

Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. 
I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana ? 
Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for very 
much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for 
telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that per- 
formed for the new-born infant the earliest office of 
ennobling kindness, — typical, by its mode, of that 
grandeur which belongs to man everyvirhere, and of that 
benignity in powers invisible which even in Pagan 
worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very 
moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first 
time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid 
on the ground. That might bear different interpreta- 
tions. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should 
grovel there for more than one instant, either the pater- 
nal hand, as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some 
near kinsman, as proxy for the father, raised it upright, 
bade it look erect as the king of all this world, and 
presented its forehead to the stars, saying, perhaps, in 
his heart, " Behold what is greater than yourselves ! " 
This symbolic act represented the function of Levana. 
And that mysterious lady, who never revealed her face 
(except to me in dreams), but always acted by delega- 
tion, had her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the 
Italian verb) levare, to raise aloft. 

This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it has 
arisen that some people have understood by Levana the 
tutelary power 'that controls the education of the nur- 
sery. She, that would not suffer at his birth even a 



238 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

prefigurativc or mimic degradation for her awful ward, 
far less could be supposed to suffer the real degradation 
attaching to the non-development of his powers. Slie 
therefore watches over human education. Now, the 
word ediico, with the penultimate short, was derived 
(by a process often exemplified in the crystallization of 
languages) from the word ediico, wUh the penuhimate 
long. Whatsoever educes, or develops, educates. By 
the education of Lcvana, therefore, is meant, — not the 
poor machinery that moves by spelling-books and gram- 
mars, but by that mighty system of central forces hid- 
den in the deep bosom of human life, which by passion, 
by strife, by temptation, by the energies of resistance, 
works forever upon children, — resting not day or night, 
any more than tlie mighty wheel of day and night them- 
selves, whose moments, like restless spokes, are glim- 
mering"^ forever as they revolve. 

If, then, these are the ministries by which Levana 
works, how profoundly must she reverence the agen- 
cies of grief! But you, reader! think, — that children 

♦ " Glimmering.''^ — As I have never allowed myself to covet any 
man's ox nor his ass, uor anytliing that is his, still less would it 
become a philosopher to covet other people's images, or meta- 
phors. Here, therefore, 1 restore to Mr. Wordsworth this fine 
image of the revolving wheel, and the glimmering spokes, as applied 
by him to the flying successions of day and night. I borrowed it 
for one moment in order to point my own sentence ; which being 
done, the reader is witness that I now pay it back instantly by a 
note made for that sole purpose. On the same principle 1 often 
borrow their seals from young ladies, when closing my letters. 
Because there is sure to be some tender sentiment upon them about 
"memory," or "hope," or "roses, or f reunion;" and my corre- 
spondent must be a sad brute who is not touched by the eloquence 
of the seal, even if his taste is so bad that he remains deaf to 
mine. 



OF AN ENGLISH 0PTU3I-EATEK. 239 

generally are not liable to grief such as mine. There 
are two senses in the word generally, — the sense of 
Euclid, where it means universally (or in the whole 
extent of the genus), and a foolish sense of this world, 
where it means usually. Now, I am far from saying 
that children universally are capable of grief like mine. 
But there are more than you ever heard of who die of 
grief in this island of ours. I will tell you a common 
case. The rules of Eton require that a boy on the 
foundation should be there twelve years : he is super- 
annuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at 
six. Children torn away from mothers and sisters at 
that age not unfrequently die. I speak of what I know. 
The complaint is not entered by the registrar as grief; 
but that it is. Grief of that sort, and at that age, has 
killed more than ever have been counted amongst its 
martyrs. 

Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the 
powers that shake man's heart : therefore it is that she 
dotes upon grief. " These ladies," said I softly to my- 
self, on seeing the ministers with whom Levana was 
conversing, " these are the Sorrows ; and they are three 
in number, as the Graces are three, who dress man's 
life with beauty : the FarccB are three, who weave the 
dark arras of man's life in their mysterious loom always 
with colors sad in part, sometimes angry with tragic 
crimson and black; the Furies are three, who visit 
with retributions called from the other side of the grave 
offences that w^alk upon this; and at once even the 
Muses were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or 
the lute, to the^ great burdens of man's impassioned 
creations. These are the Sorrows, all three of whom I 



240 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

know." The last words I 'say iwiv ; but in Oxford 1 
said, " one of whom I know, and the others too surely 
I shall know." For already, in my fervent youth, I 
saw (dimly relieved upon the dark back-ground of my 
dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the awful sisters. 
These sisters — by what name shall we call them ? 

If I say simply, " The Sorrows," there will be a 
chance of mistaking the term ; it might be understood 
of individual sorrow, — separate cases of sorrow, — 
whereas I want a term expressing the mighty abstrac- 
tions that incarnate themselves in all individual suffer- 
ings of man's heart; and I wish to have these abstrac- 
tions presented as impersonations, that is, as clothed 
with human attributes of life, and with functions point- 
ing to flesh. Let us call them, therefore. Our Ladies 
of Sorrow. I know them thoroughly, and have walked 
in all their kingdoms. Three sisters they are, of one 
mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart; 
but of their dominion there is no end. Them I saw 
often conversing with Levana, and sometimes about my- 
self. Do they talk, then ? 0, no ! Mighty phantoms 
like these disdain the infirmities of language. They 
may utter voices through the organs of man when they 
dwell in human hearts, but amongst themselves is no 
voice nor sound ; eternal silence reigns in their king- 
doms. They spoke not, as they talked with Levana; 
they whispered not; they sang not; though oftentimes 
methought they might have sung: for I upon earth 
had heard their mysteries oftentimes deciphered by 
harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and organ. Like God, 
whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure 
not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 241 

but by signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by 
pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted on darkness, 
and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the brain. 
They wheeled in mazes; I spelled the steps. They 
telegraphed from afar; J read the signals. They con- 
spired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my 
eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols ; 7nine 
are the words. 

What is it the sisters are ? What is it that they do ? 
Let me describe their form, and their presence ; if form 
it were that still fluctuated in its outline; or presence 
it were that forever advanced to the front, or forever 
receded amongst shades. 

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachry- 
mariim, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and 
day raves and moans, calling for Vanished faces. She 
stood in Kama, where a voice was heard of lamentation, 
— Rachel weeping for her children, and refused to be 
comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the 
night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Inno- 
cents, and the little feet were stiffened forever, which, 
heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, 
woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not 
unmarked in heaven. 

Her eyes are sweet and subtile, wild and sleepy, by 
turns ; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes chal- 
lenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her 
head. And I knew by childish memories that she could 
go abroad upon the winds, when she heard that sobbing 
of litanies, or the thundering of organs, and when she 
beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, 
the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal at her 
16 



242 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. 
She, to my knowledge, sate all last summer by the bed- 
side of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly 
I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, 
with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of 
play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty 
roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send 
her a great reward. In the spring-time of the year, and 
whilst yet her own spring was budding, he recalled her 
to himself. But her blind father mourns forever over 
her ; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding 
hand is locked within his own ; and still he wakens to 
a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper 
darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum also has been sit- 
tinof all this winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber 
of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not 
less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and 
left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the 
power of her keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides 
a ghostly intruder into the chambers of sleepless men, 
sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the 
Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she 
is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, 
let us honor with the title of " Madonna." 

The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our 
Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks 
abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And 
her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither 
sweet nor subtile ; no man could read their story ; they 
would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with 
wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her 
eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, 



CF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 213 

droops forever, forever fastens on the dust. She weeps 
not. She groans^ot. But she sighs inaudibly at inter- 
vals. Her sister Madonna is oftentinnes stormy and 
frantic, raging in the highest against heaven, and 
demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs 
never clamors, never defies, dreams not of rebellious 
aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the 
meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she 
may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is 
to herself in the twilight. Mutter she does at times, 
but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is 
desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone 
down to his rest. This sister is the visiter of the Pariah, 
of the Jew, of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediter- 
ranean galleys ; of the English criminal in Norfolk 
Island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in 
sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent reverting 
his eyes forever upon a solitary grave, which to him 
seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody 
sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can now be avail- 
ing, whether towards pardon that he might implore, or 
towards reparation that he might attempt. Every slave 
that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid 
reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our 
general mother, but for him a step-mother, — as he points 
Avith the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, 
but against him sealed and sequestered;^ — every 

* This, the reader \v]ll lie aware, applies chiefly to the coUun and 
tobacco States of North America ; but not to them only : on which 
account I have not scrupled to figure the sun, which looks down 
upon slavery, as tropical; no matter if strictly within the tropics, 
or simply so near to them as to produce a similar climate. 



244 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her 
head, or hope to illumine her solimde, because the 
heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature germs of 
holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly 
bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now 
burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst 
the ancients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning 
May-time by wicked kinsman, whom God will judge; 
every captive in every dungeon ; all that are betrayed, 
and all that are rejected ; outcasts by traditionary law, 
and children oi hereditary disgrace, — all these walk 
with Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key ; 
but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly 
amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant 
of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of man 
she finds chapels of her own ; and even in glorious 
England there are some that, to the world, carry their 
heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have 
received her mark upon their foreheads. 

But the third sister, who is also the youngest ! 

Hush I whisper whilst we talk of her ! Her kingdom 
is not large, or else no flesh should live ; but within that 
kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that 
of Cybile, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She 
droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden 
by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be 
hidden ; through the treble veil of crape which she 
wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests 
not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon 
of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read 
from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She 
also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 245 

suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power ; but narrow 
is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only 
those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved 
by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles 
and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from 
without and tempest from within. Madonna moves 
with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic 
grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealth- 
ily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable 
motions, bounding, and with a tiger's leaps. She car- 
ries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, 
she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter 
at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum, — Our 
Lady of Darkness. 

These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime God- 
desses,"^ these were the Eiimenides, or Gracious Ladies 
(so called by antiquity in shuddering propitiation) of 
my Oxford dreams. Madonna spoke. She spoke by 
her mysterious hand. Touching my head, she beck- 
oned to Our Lady of Sighs ; and what she spoke, trans- 
lated out of the signs which (except in dreams) no man 
reads, was this : 

" Lo ! here is he, whom in childhood I dedicated to 
my altars. This is he that once I made my darling. 
Him I led astray, him I beguiled, and from heaven I 
stole away his young heart to mine. Through me did 
he become idolatrous ; and through me it was, by lan- 

*'' Sublime Goddesses.^' — The word Ofuvog is usually rendered 
venerable in dictionaries ; not a very flattering epithet for females. 
But by weighing a number of passages in which the word is used 
pointedly, I am disposed to think that it comes nearest to our idea 
of the sublime, as near as a Greek word could come. 



246 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

guishing desires, that he worshipped the worm, and 
prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to 
him; lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. 
Him, this young idolator, I have seasoned for thee, 
dear gentle Sister of Sighs! Do thou take him now 
to thy heart, and season him for our dreadful sister. 
And thou," — turning to the Mater Tenehraruvi, she 
said, — "wicked sister, that temptest and hatest, do 
thou take him from her. See that thy sceptre lie 
heavy on his head. Suffer not woman and her tender- 
ness to sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frail- 
ties of hope, wither the relenting of love, scorch the 
fountains of tears, curse him as only thou canst curse. 
So shall he be accomplished in the furnace, so shall 
he see the things that ought not to be seen, sights that 
are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. So 
shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fear- 
ful truths. So shall he rise again before he dies. And 
so shall our commission be accomplished which from 
God we had, — to plague his heart until we had un- 
folded the capacities of his spirit." ^ 

*The reader, who wishes at all to understand the course of these 
Confessions, ought not to pass over this dream-legend. There is 
no great wonder that a vision, which occupied my waking thoughts 
in those years, should reappear in my dreams. It was, in fact, a 
legend recurring in sleep, most of which I had myself silently writ- 
ten or sculptured in my daylight reveries. But its importaiice to 
the present Confessions is this, that it rehearses or prefigures their 
course. This first part belongs to Madonna. The third belongs 
to the "Mater Suspiriorum," and will be entitled The Pariah 
Worlds. The fourth, which terminates the Avork, belongs to the 
" Mater Tenebrarum," and will be entitled The Kmg-dom of Dark- 
ness. As to the SECOND, it is an interpolation requisite to the 
effect of the others, and will be explained in its proper place. 



OF AN ENGLISH OnUM-EATER. 247 



THE APPARITION OF THE BROCKEN. 

Ascend with me on this dazzling Whitsunday the 
Brocken of North Germany. The dawn opened in 
cloudless beauty; it is a dawn of bridal June; but, 
as the hours advanced, her youngest sister April, that 
sometimes cares little for racing across both frontiers 
of May, frets the bridal lady's sunny temper with 
sallies of wheeling and careering showers, flying and 
pursuing, opening and closing, hiding and restoring. 
On such a morning, aad reaching the summits of the 
forest mountain about sunrise, we shall have one 
chance the more for seeing the famous Spectre of the 
Brocken.^ Who and what is he ? He is a solitary 



* " Spectre of the Brocken.^^ — This very striking phenomenon has 
been continually described by writers, both German and English, 
for the last fifty years. Many readers, however, will not have met 
with these descriptions ; and on their account I add a few words in 
explanation, referring them for the best scientific comment on the 
case to Sir David T5rewster's " Natural Magic." The spectre takes 
the shape of a human figure, or, if the visiters are more than one, 
then the spectres multiply ; they arrange themselves on the blue 
ground of the sky, or the dark ground of any clouds that maybe in 
the right quarter, or perhaps they are strongly relieved against a 
curtain of rock, at a distance of some miles, and always exhibiting 
gigantic proportions. At first, from the distance and the colossal 
size, every spectator supposes the appearance to be quite independ- 
ent of himself. But very soon he is surprised to observe his own 
motions and gestures mimicked ; and wakens to the conviction that 
the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself. This Titan 
amongst the apparitions of earth is exceedingly capricious, vanish- 
ing abruptly for reasons best known to himself, and more coy in 
coming forward than the Lady Echo of Ovid. One reason why he 
is seen so seldom mi^st be ascribed to the concurrence of conditions 
under which only the phenomenon can be manifested ; the sun must 



248 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

apparition, in the sense of loving solitude ; else he is 
not always solitary in his personal manifestations, but, 
on proper occasions, has been known to unmask a 
strength quite sufficient to alarm those who had been 
insulting him. 

Now, in order to test the nature of this mysterious 
apparition, we will try two or three experiments upon 
him. "What we fear, and with some reason, is, that as 
he lived so many ages with foul Pagan sorcerers, and 
witnessed so many centuries of dark idolatries, his heart 
may have been corrupted ; and that even now his faith 
may be wavering or impure. We will try. 

Make the- sign of the cross, and observe whether he 
repeats it (as on Whitsunday=^ he surely ought to do). 

be near to the horizon (which of itself implies a time of day incon- 
venient to a person starling from a station as distant as Elbinger- 
ode) ; the spectator must have his back to the sun ; and the air 
must contain some vapor, but partially distributed. Coleridge 
ascended the Brocken on the Whitsunday of 1799, with a party of 
English students from Goettingen, but failed to see the phantom ; 
afterwards in England (and under the three same conditions) he saw 
a much rarer phenomenon, which he described in the following 
eight lines. I give them from a correct copy (the apostrophe in the 
beginning must be understood as addressed to an ideal conception) ; 

" And art thou nothing ? Such thou art as when 
The woodman winding westw^ard up the glen 
At wintry dawn, when o'er the sheep-track's maze 
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze, 
Sees full before him, gliding without tread, 
An image with a glory round its head ; 
This shade he worships for its golden hues, 
And makes (not knowing) that which he pursues." 

* " On Whitsunda]/.'^ — It is singular, and perhaps owing to the 
temperature and weather likely to prevail in that early part of sum- 
mer, that more appearances of the spectre have been witnessed on 
Whitsunday than on any other day. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 249 

Look! he does repeat it; but the driving showers per- 
plex the images, and that, perhaps, it is which gives 
him the air of one who acts reluctantly or evasively. 
Now, again, the sun shines more brightly, and the show- 
ers have swept off like squadrons of cavalry to the rear. 
We will try him again. 

Pluck an anemone, one of these many anemones 
which once was called the sorcerer's flower,^ and bore 
a part, perhaps, in this horrid ritual of fear; carry it to 
that stone which mimics the outline of a heathen altar, 
and once was called the sorcerer's altar ;'^ then bend- 
ing your knee, and raising your right hand to God, 
say, — " Father, which art in heaven, this lovely ane- 
mone, that once glorified the worship of fear, has 
travelled back into thy fold ; this altar, which once 
reeked with bloody rites to Cortho, has long been 
rebaptized into thy holy service. The darkness is 
gone; the cruelty is gone which the darkness bred; 
the moans have passed away which the victims uttered ; 
the cloud has vanished which once sate continually upon 
their graves, cloud of protestation that ascended forever 
to thy throne from the tears of the defenceless, and the 
anger of the just. And lo! I thy servant, with this dark 
phantom, whom for one hour on this thy festival of Pen- 
tecost I make 7ny servant, render thee united worship 
in this thy recovered temple," 



* " Tke sorcerer's flower, '^ and ^Hhe sorce'^er's altar.'' — Theso 
are names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an 
altar-shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits ; and it 
is not doubted that they both connect themselves, through links of 
ancient tradition, with the gloomy realities of Paganism, when the 
whole Hartz and the Brocken formed for a very long time the last 
asylum to a ferocious but perishing idolatry. 



250 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

Look now! the apparition plucks an anemone, and 
places it on an altar ; he also bends his knee, he also 
raises his right hand to God. Dumb he is; but some- 
times the dumb serve God acceptably. Yet still it 
occurs to you, that perhaps on this high festival of the 
Christian church he may be overruled by supernatural 
influence into confession of his homage, having so 
often been made to bow and bend his knee at murder- 
ous rites. In a service of religion he may be timid. 
Let us try him, therefore, with an earthly passion, 
where he will have no bias either from favor or from 
fear. 

If, then, once in childhood you suffered an afiectioii 
that was ineflfable, — if once, when powerless to face such 
an enemy, you were summoned to fight with the tiger 
that couches within the separations of the grave, — in 
that case, after the example of Judaea (on the Roman 
coins), — sitting under her palm-tree to weep, but sit- 
ting with her head veiled, — do you also veil your 
head. Many years are passed away since then ; and 
you were a little ignorant thing at that time, hardly 
above six years old ; or perhaps (if you durst tell all 
the truth), not quite so much. But your heart was 
deeper than the Danube; and, as was your love, so was 
your grief. Many years are gone since that darkness 
settled on your head ; many summers, many winters ; 
yet still its shadows wheel round upon you at intervals, 
like these April showers upon this glory of bridal June. 
Therefore now, on this dovelike morning of Pentecost, 
do you veil your head like Judcea in memory of that 
transcendent woe, and in testimony that, indeed, it sur- 
passed all utterance of words. Immediately you see 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 251 

that the apparition of the Brocken veils his head, after 
the model of Judaea weeping under her palm-tree, as if 
he also had a human heart, and that he also, in child- 
hood, having suffered an affliction which was ineffable, 
wished by these mute symbols to breathe a sigh towards 
heaven in memory of that affliction, and by way of 
record, though many a year after, that it was indeed 
unutterable by words. 

This trial is decisive. You are now satisfied that the 
apparition is but a reflex of yourself; and, in uttering 
your secret feelings to him, you make this phantom the 
dark symbolic mirror for reflection to the daylight what 
else must be hidden forever. 

Such a relation does the Dark Interpreter, whom 
immediately the reader will learn to know as an intruder 
into my dreams, bear to my own mind. He is origi- 
nally a mere reflex of my inner nature. But as the 
apparition of the Brocken sometimes is disturbed by 
storms or by driving showers, so as to dissemble his 
real origin, in like manner the Interpreter sometimes 
swerves out of my orbit, and mixes a little with alien 
natures. I do not always know him in these cases as 
my own parhelion. What he says, generally, is but 
that which / have said in daylight, and in meditation 
deep enough to sculpture itself on my heart. But 
sometiines, as his face alters, his words alter; and they 
do not always seem such as I have used, or could use. 
No man can account for all things that occur in dreams. 
Generally I believe this, — that he is a faithful represent- 
ative of myself; but he also is at times subject to the 
action of the good Phantasus, who rules in dreams. 



252 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

Hailstone choruses^ besides, and storms, enter my 
dreams. Hailstones and fire that run along the ground, 
sleet and blinding hurricanes, revelations of glory in- 
sufferable pursued by volleying darkness, — these are 
powers able to disturb any features that originally were 
but shadow, and so send drifting the anchors of any 
vessel that rides upon deeps so treacherous as those of 
dreams. Understand, however, the Interpreter to bear 
generally the office of a tragic chorus at Athens. The 
Greek chorus is perhaps not quite understood by critics, 
any more than the Dark Interpreter by myself. But 
the leading function of both must be supposed this — not 
to tell you anything absolutely new, — that was done by 
the actors in the drama ; but to recall you to your own 
lurking thoughts, — hidden for the moment or imper- 
fectly developed, — and to place before you, in immediate 
connection with groups vanishing too quickly for any 
effort of meditation on your own part, such comment- 
aries, prophetic or looking back, pointing the moral 'or 
deciphering the mystery, justifying Providence, or miti- 
gating the fierceness of anguish, as would or might have 
occurred to your own meditative heart, had only time 
been allowed for its motions. 

The Interpreter is anchored and stationary in my 
dreams; but great storms and driving mists cause him 
to fluctuate uncertainly, or even to retire altogether, 
like his gloomy counterpart, the shy phantom of the 
Brocken, — and to assume new features or strange 

* ''Hailstone choruses." — I need not tell any lover of Handel 
that his oratorio of " Israel in Egypt " contains a chorus familiarly 
known by this name. The words are : "And he gave them hail- 
stones for rain ; fire, mingled with hail, ran along upon the ground." 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 253 

features, as in dreams always there is a power not con- 
tented with reproduction, but which absolutely creates 
or transforms. This dark being the reader will see 
again in a further stage of my opium experience ; and I 
warn him that he will not always be found sitting inside 
my dreams, but at times outside, and in open daylight. 



FINALE TO PART I. — SAVANNAH-LA-MAR. 

God smote Savannah-la-mar, and in one night, by 
earthquake, removed her, with all her towers standing 
and population sleeping, from the steadfast foundations 
of the shore to the coral floors of ocean. And God 
said, — " Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men 
through seventeen centuries : this city I will bury, but 
not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my 
mysterious anger, set in azure light through genera- 
tions to come ; for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome 
of my tropic seas." This city, therefore, like a mighty 
galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers flying, 
and tackling perfect, seems floating along the noiseless 
depths of ocean ; and oftentimes in glassy calms, 
through the translucid atmosphere of water that now 
stretches like an air-woven awning above the silent 
encampment, mariners from every clime look down 
into her courts and terraces, count her gates, and 
number the spires of her churches. She is one ample 
cemetery, and has been for many a year; but in the 
mighty calms that brood for weeks over tropic latitudes, 
she fascinates the eye with a Fata-Morgana revelation, 



254 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

as of human life still subsisting in submarine asylums 
sacred from the storms that torment our upper air. 

Thither, lured by the loveliness of cerulean depths, 
by the peace of human dwellings privileged from 
molestation, by the gleam of marble altars sleeping 
in everlasting sanctity, oftentimes in dreams did I and 
the Dark Interpreter cleave the watery veil that divided 
us from her streets. We looked into the belfries, 
where the pendulous bells were waiting in vain for the 
summons which should awaken their marriage peals; 
together we touched the mighty organ-keys, that sang 
no jubilates for the ear of Heaven, that sang no re- 
quiems for the ear of human sorrow; together we 
searched the silent nurseries, where the children were 
all asleep, and had been asleep through five genera- 
tions. "They are waiting for the heavenly dawn," 
whispered the Interpreter to himself: "and, when that 
comes, the bells and the organs will utter a jiihilate 
repeated by the echoes of Paradise." Then, turning 
to me, he said, — "This is sad, this is piteous; but 
less would not have sufficed for the purpose of God. 
Look here. Put into a Roman clepsydra one hundred 
drops of water; let these run out as the sands in an 
hour-gla:^s; every drop measuring the hundredth part 
of a second, so that each shall represent but the three- 
hundred-and-sixty-thousandth part of an hour. Now, 
count the drops as they race along; and, when the 
fiftieth of the hundred is passing, behold! forty-nine 
are not, because already they have perished ; and fifty 
are not, because they are yet to come. You see, 
therefore, how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the 
true and actual present. Of that time which we call 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 255 

the present, hardly a hundredth part but belongs cither 
to a past which has fled, or to a future which is still on 
the wing. It has perished, or it is not born. It was, 
or it is not. Yet even this approximation to the truth 
is infinitdy false. For again subdivide that solitary- 
drop, which only was found to represent the present, 
into a lower series of similar fractions, and the actual 
present which you arrest measures now but the thirty- 
sixth-millionth of an hour; and so by infinite declen- 
sions the true and very present, in which only we live 
and enjoy, will vanish into a mote of a mote, dis- 
tinguishable only by a heavenly vision. Therefore the 
present, which only man possesses, offers less capacity 
for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider 
twisted from her womb. Therefore, also, even this 
incalculable shadow from the narrowest pencil of moon- 
light is more transitory than geometry can measure, or 
thought of angel can overtake. The time which is 
contracts into a mathematic point; and even that point 
perishes a thousand times before we can utter its birth. 
All is finite in the present; and even that finite is 
infinite in its velocity of flight towards death. But in 
God there is nothing finite; but in God there is nothing 
transitory ; but in God there can be nothing that tends to 
death. Therefore, it follows, that for God there can be 
no present. The future is the present of God, and to 
the future it is that he sacrifices the human present. 
Therefore it is that he works by earthquake. There- 
fore it is that he works by grief. 0, deep is the plough- 
ing of earthquake ! O, deep" — [and his voice swelled 
like a sanctus rising from the choir of a cathedral] — 
" 0, deep is the ploughing of grief! But oftentimes 



256 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

less would not suffice for the agriculture of God. Upon 
a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of 
pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an 
infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glori- 
ous vintages that could not else have been. Less than 
these fierce ploughshares would not have stirred the 
stubborn soil. The one is needed for earth, our planet, 
— for earth itself as the dwelling-place of man; but 
the other is needed yet oftener for God's mightiest 
instrument, — yes" [and he looked solemnly at myself], 
" is needed for the mysterious children of the earth ! " 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 257 



PART II 



The Oxford visions, of which some have been given, 
were but anticipations necessary to illustrate the glimpse 
opened of childhood (as being- its reaction). In this 
Second part, returning from that anticipation, I retrace 
an abstract of my boyish and youthful days, so far as 
they furnished or exposed the germs of later experiences 
in worlds more shadowy. 

Upon me, as upon others scattered thinly by tens and 
twenties over every thousand years, fell too powerfully 
and too early the vision of life. The horror of life 
mixed itself already in earliest youth with the heavenly 
sweetness of life ; that grief, which one in a hundred 
has sensibility enough to gather from the sad retrospect 
of life in its closing stage, for me shed its dews as a 
prelibation upon the fountains of life whilst yet spark- 
linq: to the morninof sun. I saw from afar and from 
before what I was to see from behind. Is this the 
description of an early youth passed in the shades of 
gloom ? No ; but of a youth passed in the divinest 
happiness. And if the reader has (which so few have) 
the passion, without which there is no reading of the 
legend and superscription upon man's brow, if he is 
not (as most are) deafer than the grave to every deep 
note that sighs upwards from the Delphic caves of 
human life, he will know that the rapture of life (or 
17 



258 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

anything which by approach can merit that name) does 
not arise, unless as perfect mnsic arises, music of 
Mozart or Beethoven, by the confluence of the mighty 
and terrific discords with the subtile concords. Not by 
contrast, or as reciprocal foils, do these elements act, 
which is the feeble conception of many, but by union. 
The}" are the sexual forces in music : "male and female 
created he them;" and these mighty antagonists do not 
put forth their hostilities by repulsion, but by deepest 
attraction. 

As " in to-day already walks to-morrow," so in the 
past experience of a youthful life may be seen dimly 
the future. The collisions with alien interests or hostile 
views, of a child, boy, or very young man, so insulated 
as each of these is sure to be, — those aspects of opposi- 
tion which such a person can occupy, — are limited by 
the exceedingly few and trivial lines of connection 
along which he is able to radiate any essential influence 
whatever upon the fortunes or happiness of others. 
Circumstances may magnify his importance for the 
moment; but, after all, any cable which he carries out 
upon other vessels is easily slipped upon a feud arising. 
Far otherwise is the state of relations connecting an 
adult or responsible man with the circles around him, 
as life advances. The net-work of these relations is a 
thousand times more intricate, the jarring of these intri- 
cate relations a thousand times more frequent, and 
the vibrations a thousand times harsher which these 
jarrings diff'use. This truth is felt beforehand mis- 
givingly and in troubled vision, by a young man who 
stands upon the threshold of manhood. One earliest 
instinct of fear and horror would darken his spirit, if it 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATEE. 259 

could be revealed to itself and self-questioned at the 
moment of birth : a second instinct of the same nature 
would again pollute that tremulous mirror, if the 
moment were as punctually marked as physical birth is 
marked, which dismisses him finally upon the tides of 
absolute self-control. A dark ocean would seem the 
total expanse of life from the first ; but far darker and 
more appalling would seem that interior and second 
chamber of the ocean which called him away forever 
from the direct accountability of others. Dreadful 
would be the morning which should say, " Be thou a 
human child incarnate ;" but more dreadful the morning 
which should say, " Bear thou henceforth the sceptre of 
thy self-dominion through life, and the passion of life !" 
Yes, dreadful would be both ; but without a basis of the 
dreadful there is no perfect rapture. It is a part through 
the sorrow of life, growing out of dark events, that this 
basis of awe and solemn darkness slowly accumulates. 
That I have illustrated. But, as life expands, it is more 
through the strife which besets us, strife from conflicting 
opinions, positions, passions, interests, that the funereal 
ground settles and deposits itself, which sends upward 
the dark lustrous brilliancy through the jewel of life, 
else revealing a pale and superficial glitter. Either the 
human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a 
more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow, and 
without intellectual revelation. 

Through accident it was in part, and, where through 
no accident but my own nature, not through features of 
it at all painful to recollect, that constantly in early life 
(that is, from boyish days until eighteen, when, by going 
to Oxford, practically I became my own master) I was 



260 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 



engaged in duels of fierce continual struggle, with some 
person or body of persons, that sought, like the Roman 
retiarms^ to throw a net of deadly coercion or constraint 
over the undoubted rights of my natural freedom. The 
steady rebellion upon my part in one half was a mere 
human reaction of justifiable indignation ; but in the 
other half it was the struggle of a conscientious nature, 
— disdaining to feel it as any mere right or discretional 
privilege, — no, feeling it as the noblest of duties to 
resist, though it should be mortally, those that would 
have enslaved me, and to retort scorn upon those that 
would have put my head below their feet. Too much, 
even in later life, I have perceived, in men that pass for 
good men, a disposition to degrade (and if possible to 
degrade through self-degradation) those in whom unwil- 
lingly they feel any weight of oppression to them- 
selves, by commanding qualities of intellect or character. 
They respect you : they are compelled to do so, and 
they hate to do so. Next, therefore, they seek to throw 
off the sense of this oppression, and to ta'ie vengeance 
for it, by cooperating with any unhappy accidents in 
your life, to inflict a sense of humiliation upon you, and 
(if possible) to force you into becoming a consenting 
party to that humiliation. O, wherefore is it that those 
who presume to call themselves the " friends " of this 
man or that woman are so often those, above all others, 
whom in the hour of death that man or woman is most 
likely to salute with the valediction — Would God I had 
never seen your face ? 

In citing one or two cases of these early struggles, I 
have chiefly in view the effect of these upon my subse- 
quent visions under the reign of opium. And this indul- 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 261 

gent reflection should accompany the mature reader 
through all such records of boyish inexperience. A 
good-tempered man, who is also acquainted with the 
world, will easily evade, without needing any artifice of 
servile obsequiousness, those quarrels which an upright 
simplicity, jealous of its own rights, and unpractised in 
the science of worldly address, cannot always evade 
without some loss of self-respect. Suavity in this man- 
ner may, it is true, be reconciled with firmness in the 
matter; but not easily by a young person who wants 
all the appropriate resources of knowledge, of adroit 
and guarded language, for making his good temper 
available. Men are protected from insult and wrong, 
not merely by their own skill, but also, in the absence 
of any skill at all, by the general spirit of forbearance 
to which society has trained all those whom they are 
likely to meet. But boys meeting with no such for- 
bearance or training in other boys, must sometimes be 
thrown upon feuds in the ratio of their own firmness, 
much more than in the ratio of any natural proneness 
to quarrel. Such a subject, however, will be best illus- 
trated by a sketch or two of my own principal feuds. 

The first, but merely transient and playful, nor worth 
noticing at all, but for its subsequent resurrection under 
other and awful coloring in my dreams, grew out of an 
imaginary slight, as I viewed it, put upon me by one of 
my guardians. I had four guardians; and the one of 
these who had the most knowledge and talent of the 
whole — a banker, living about a hundred miles from my 
home — had invited me, when eleven years old, to his 
house. His eldest^ daughter, perhaps a year younger 
than myself, wore at that time upon her very lovely 



262 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

face the most angelic expression of character and tem- 
per that I have ahnost ever seen. Naturally, I fell in 
love with her. It seems absurd to say so; and the 
more so, because two children more absolutely innocent 
than we were cannot be imagined, neither of us having 
ever been at any school; but the simple truth is, that in 
the most chivalrous sense I was in love with her. And 
the proof that I was so showed itself in three separate 
modes : I kissed her glove on any rare occasion when I 
found it lying on a table; secondly, I looked out for 
some excuse to be jealous of her; and, thirdly, I did 
my very best to get up a quarrel. What 1 wanted the 
quarrel for was the luxury of a reconciliation ; a hill 
cannot be had, you know, without going to the expense 
of a valley. And though I hated the very thought of a 
moment's difference with so truly gentle a girl, yet how, 
but through such a purgatory, could one win the para- 
dise of her returning smiles ? All this, however, came 
to nothing; and simply because she positively w^ould 
not quarrel. And the jealousy fell through, because 
there was no decent subject for such a passion, unless 
it had settled upon an old music-master, whom lunacy 
itself could not adopt as a rival. The quarrel, mean- 
time, which never prospered w^ith the daughter, silently 
kindled on m^y part towards the father. His offence was 
this. At dinner, I naturally placed myself by the side 
of M., and it gave me great pleasure to touch her hand 
at intervals. As M. was my cousin, though twice or 
even three times removed, I did not feel it taking too 
great a liberty in this little act of tenderness. No matter 
if three thousand times removed, I said, my cousin is 
my cousin; nor had I very much designed to conceal the 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 263 

act ; or if so, rather on her account than my own. One 
evening, however, papa observed ray manoeuvre. Did 
he seem displeased? Not at all; he even conde- 
scended to smile. But the next day he placed M. on 
the side opposite to myself. In one respect this was 
really an improvement, because it gave me a better 
view of my cousin's sweet countenance. But th?n 
there was the loss of the hand to be considered, and 
secondly there was the affront. It was clear that ven- 
geance must be had. Now, there was but one thing in 
this world that I could do even decently ; but that I 
could do admirably. This was writing Latin hexame- 
ters. Juvenal — though it was not very much of him 
that I had then read — seemed to me a divine model. 
The inspiration of wrath spoke through him as through 
a Hebrevv^ prophet. The same inspiration spoke now in 
me. Facit indignatio versum, said Juvenal. And it 
must be owned that indignation has never made such 
good verses since as she did in that day. But still, 
even to me, this agile passion proved a Muse of genial 
inspiration for a couple of paragraphs ; and one line I 
will mention as worthy to have taken its place in 
Juvenal himself. I say this without scruple, having 
not a shadow of vanit3% ^°^' ^^^ ^^^ other hand, a shadow 
of false modesty connected with such bojash accomplish- 
ments. The poem opened thus : 

" Te nemis austeruin sacrfe qui federa mensae 
Diruis, insector Satyrse reboante flagello. " 

But the line which I insist upon as of Roman strength 
was the closino- one of the next sentence. The greneral 
effect of the sentiment was, that my clamorous wrath 



264 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

should make its way even into ears that were past 

hearing : 

'' mea saeva querela 

Aurihus insidet ceratis, auribus etsi 

Nou audituris hyberna nocte procellam." 

The power, however, which inflated my verse, soon 
collapsed ; having been soothed, from the very first, by 
finding, that except in this one instance at the dinner- 
table, which probably had been viewed as an indecorum, 
no further restraint, of any kind whatever, was medi- 
tated upon my intercourse with M. Besides, it was too 
painful to lock up good verses in one's own solitary 
breast. Yet how could I shock the sweet filial heart 
of my cousin by a fierce lampoon or stylites against 
her father, had Latin even figured amongst her accom- 
plishments? Then it occurred to me that the verses 
might be shown to the father. But was there not 
something treacherous in gaining a man's approbation 
under a mask to a satire upon himself? Or would he 
have always understood me? For one person, a year 
after, took the sacrce mensce (by which I had meant the 
sanctities of hospitality) to mean the sacramental ta- 
ble. And on consideration, I began to suspect that 
many people would pronounce myself the party who 
had violated the holy ties of hospitality, which are 
equally binding on guest as on host. Indolence, which 
sometimes comes in aid of good impulses as well as 
bad, favored these relenting thoughts. The society 
of M. did still more to wean me from further efforts 
of satire ; and, finally, my Latin poem remained a 
torso. But, upon the whole, my guardian had a nar- 
row escape of descending to posterity in a disadvan- 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 



265 



tageous light, had he rolled down to it through my 
hexameters. 

Here was a case of merely playful feud. But the 
same talent of Latin verses soon after connected me with 
a real feud, that harassed my mind more than would be 
supposed, and precisely by this agency, namely, that it 
arrayed one set of feelings against another. It divided 
my mind, as by domestic feud, against itself. About a 
year after returning from the visit to my guardian's, 
and when I must have been nearly completing my 
twelfth year, I was sent to a great public school. 
Every man has reason to rejoice who enjoys so great 
an advantage. I condemned, and do condemn, the 
practice of sometimes sending out into such stormy 
exposures those who are as yet too young, too de- 
pendent on female gentleness, and endowed with sensi- 
bilities too exquisite. But at nine or ten the masculine 
energies of the character are beginning to be developed ; 
or if not, no discipline will better aid in their develop- 
ment than the bracing intercourse of a great English 
classical school. Even the selfish are forced into 
accommodating themselves to a public standard of 
generosity, and the effeminate into conforming to a rule 
of manliness. I was myself at two public schools ; and 
I think with gratitude of the benefit which I reaped 
from both ; as also I think with gratitude of the upright 
guardian in whose quiet household I learned Latin so 
effectually. But the small private schools which I 
witnessed for brief periods, containing thirty to forty 
boys, were models of ignoble manners as respected 
some part of the juniors, and of favoritism amongst 
the masters. Nowhere is the sublimity of public jus- 



266 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

tice so broadly exemplified as in an English school. 
There is not in the universe such an areopagus for fair 
play, and abhorrence of all crooked ways, as an Eng- 
lish mob, or one of the English time-honored public 
schools. But my own first introduction to such an 
establishment was under peculiar and contradictory cir- 
cumstances. When my " rating," or graduation in the 
school, was to be settled, naturally my altitude (to 
speak astronomically) was taken by the proficiency in 
Greek. But I could then barely construe books so 
easy as the Greek Testament and the Iliad. This was 
considered quite well enough for my age ; but still it 
caused me to be placed three steps below the highest 
rank in the school. Within one week, however, my 
talent for Latin verses, which had by this time gathered 
strength and expansion, became known. I was honored 
as never was man or boy since Mordecai the Jew. Not 
properly belonging to the flock of the head master, but 
to the leading section of the second, I was now 
weekly paraded for distinction at the supreme tribu- 
nal of the school ; out of which at first grew nothing but 
a sunshine of approbation delightful to my heart, still 
brooding upon solitude. Within six weeks this had 
changed. The approbation, indeed, continued, and the 
public testimony of it. Neither would there, in the 
ordinary course, have been any painful reiiction from 
jealousy, or fretful resistance to the soundness of my 
pretensions ; since it was sufficiently known to some of 
my school-fellows, that I, who had no male relatives but 
military men, and those in India, could not have bene- 
fited by any clandestine aid. But, unhappily, the head 
master was at that time dissatisfied with some points in 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 



267 



the progress of his head form ; and, as it soon appeared, 
was continually throwing in their teeth the brilliancy 
of my verses at twelve, by comparison with theirs at 
seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen. I had observed him 
sometimes pointing to myself; and was perplexed at 
seeing this gesture followed by gloomy looks, and what 
French reporters call " sensation," in these young men, 
whom naturally I viewed with aw^e as my leaders, boys 
that were called young men, men that were reading 
Sophocles — (a name that carried with it the sound of 
something seraphic to mj^ ears), — and who never had 
vouchsafed to w^aste a word on such a child as myself. 
The day was come, however, w^hen all that would be 
changed. One of these leaders strode up to me in 
the public play-grounds, and delivering a blow on my 
shoulder, which was not intended to hurt me, but as a 
mere formula of introduction, asked me "What the 
d — 1 I meant by bolting out of the course, and annoying 
other people in that manner? Were other people to 
have no rest for me and my verses, which, after all, 
were horribly bad?" There might have been some 
difficulty in returning an answer to this address, but 
none was required. I was briefly admonished to see 

that 1 wrote v/orse for the future, or else . At this 

aposiojjesis, I looked inquiringly at the speaker, and he 
filled up the chasm by saying that he would "annihi- 
late " me. Could any person fail to be aghast at such 
a demand ? I was to write w^orse than my own stand- 
ard, which, by his account of my verses, must be diffi- 
cult; and I was to write worse than himself, which 
might be impossible. My feelings revolted, it may be 
supposed, against so arrogant a demand, unless it had 



268 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

been far otherwise expressed ; and on the next occasion 
for sending up verses, so far from attending to the orders 
issued, I double-shotted my guns ; double applause de- 
scended on myself; but I remarked, with some awe, 
though not repenting of what I had done, that double 
confusion seemed to agitate the ranks of my enemies. 
Amongst them loomed out in the distance my " annihi- 
lating" friend, who shook his huge fist at me, but 
with something like a grim smile about his eyes. He 
took an early opportunity of paying his respects to 
me, saying, "You little devil, do you call this writing 
your worst ? " " No," I replied ; " I call it writing my 
best." The annihilator, as it turned out, was really 
a -good-natured young man ; but he soon went off to 
Cambridge; and with the rest, or some of them, I 
continued to wage war for nearly a year. And yet, 
for a word spoken with kindness, I would have resigned 
the peacock's feather in my cap as the merest of bau- 
bles. Undoubtedly praise sounded sweet in my ears 
also. But that was nothing by comparison with what 
stood on the other side. I detested distinctions that 
were connected with mortification to others. And, even 
if I could have got over that^ the eternal feud fretted 
and tormented my nature. Love, that once in child- 
hood had been so mere a necessity to me, that, had long 
been a mere reflected ray from a departed sunset. 
But peace, and freedom from strife, if love were no 
longer possible (as so rarely it is in this world), was 
the absolute necessity of my heart. To contend w^ith 
somebody was still my fate ; how to escape the con- 
tention I could not see ; and yet for itself, and the 
deadly passions into which it forced me, I hated and 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 269 

loathed it more than death. It added to the distraction 
and internal feud of my own mind, that I could not 
altogether condemn the upper boys. I was made a 
handle of humiliation to them. And, in the mean time, 
if I had an advantage in one accomplishment, which is 
all a matter of accident, or peculiar taste and feeling, 
they, on the other hand, had a great advantage over me 
in the more elaborate difficulties of Greek, and of choral 
Greek poetry. I could not altogether wonder at their 
hatred of myself. Yet still, as they had chosen to 
adopt this mode of conflict with me, I did not feel that I 
had any choice but to resist. The contest was termi- 
nated for me by my removal from the school, in conse- 
quence of a very threatening illness affecting my head ; 
but it lasted nearly a year, and it did not close before 
several amongst my public enemies had become my 
private friends. They were much older, but they invited 
me to the houses of their friends, and showed me a 
respect which deeply affected me, — this respect having 
more reference, apparently, to the firmness I had exhib- 
ited, than to the splendor of my verses. And, indeed, 
these had rather drooped, from a natural accident ; 
several persons of my own class had formed the 
practice of asking me to write verses for them. I 
could not refuse. But, as the subjects given out were 
the same for all of us, it was not possible to take so 
many crops off the ground without starving the quality 
of all. 

Two years and a half from this time, I was again at 
a public school of ancient foundation. Now I was 
myself one of the three who formed the highest class. 
Now I mj'^elf was familiar with Sophocles, who once 



270 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

had been so shadowy a name in my ear. But, strange 
to say, now, in my sixteenth year, I cared nothing at 
all for the glory of Latin verse. All the business of 
school was light and trivial in my eyes. Costing me 
not an effort, it could not engage any part of my 
attention ; that was now swallowed up altogether by the 
literature of my native land. I still reverenced the 
Grecian drama, as always I must. But else I cared 
little then for classical pursuits. A deeper spell had 
mastered me ; and I lived only in those bowers where 
deeper passions spoke. 

Here, however, it was that began another and more 
important struggle. I was drawing near to seventeen, 
aftd, in a year after that^ would arrive the usual time 
for going to Oxford. To Oxford my guardians made 
no objection ; and they readily agreed to make the 
allowance then universally regarded as the minimum 
for an Oxford student, namely, £200 per annum. But 
they insisted, as a previous condition, that I should 
make a positive and definite choice of a profession. 
No\v, I was well aware, that, if I did make such a 
choice, no law existed, nor could any obligation be 
created through deeds or signature, by which I could 
finally be compelled into keeping my engagement. But 
this evasion did not suit me. Here, again, I felt indig- 
nantly that the principle of the attempt was unjust. 
The object was certainly to do me service by saving 
money, since, if I selected the bar as my profession, 
it was contended by some persons (misinformed, how- 
ever), that not Oxford, but a special pleader's office, 
would be my proper destination ; but I cared not for 
arguments of that sort. Oxford I was determined to 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 271 

make my home ; and also to bear my future course 
utterly untrammelled by promises that I might repent. 
Soon came the catastrophe of this struggle. A little 
before my seventeenth birth-day, I walked off, one 
lovely summer morning, to North Wales, rambled there 
for months, and, finally, under some obscure hopes of 
raising money on my personal security, I went up to 
London. Now I was in my eighteenth year, and 
during this period it was that I passed through that 
trial of severe distress, of which I gave some account 
in my former Confessions. Hav ing a motive, however, 
for glancing backwards briefly at that period in the 
present series, I will do so at this point. 

I saw in one journal an insinuation that the incidents 
in the preliminary narrative were possibly without 
foundation. To such an expression of mere gratuitous 
malignity, as it happened to be supported by no one 
argument, except a remark, apparently absurd, but 
certainly false, I did not condescend to answer. In 
reality, the possibility had never occurred to me that 
any person of judgment would seriously suspect me of 
taking liberties with that part of the work, since, 
though no one of the parties concerned but myself 
stood in so central a position to the circumstances as 
to be acquainted with allo'i them, many were acquainted 
with each separate section of the memoir. Relays 
of witnesses might have been summoned to mount 
guard, as it were, upon the accuracy of each^ particular 
in the whole succession of incidents ; and some of 
these people had an interest, more or less strong, in 
exposing any deviation from the strictest letter of the 
truth, had it been in their power to do so. It is now 



272 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

twenty-two years since I saw the objection here alluded 
to ; and in saying that I did not condescend to 
notice it, the reader must not find any reason for 
taxing me with a blamable haughtiness. But every 
man is entitled to be haughty when his veracity is 
impeached ; and still more when it is impeached by a 
dishonest objection, or, if not that, by an objection 
which argues a carelessness of attention almost amount- 
ing to dishonesty, in a case where it was meant to 
sustain an imputation of falsehood. Let a man read 
carelessly, if he will, but not where he is meaning to 
use his reading for a purpose of wounding another man's 
honor. Having thus, by twenty-two years' silence, 
sufficiently expressed my contempt for the slander,^ 
I now feel myself at liberty to draw it into notice, 
for the sake, inter alia, of showing in how rash a spirit 
malignity often works. In the preliminary account 
of certain boyish adventures which had exposed me 
to suffering of a kind not commonly incident to persons 
in my station in life, and leaving behind a temptation 
to the use of opium under certain arrears of weakness, 
I had occasion to notice a disreputable attorney in 
London, who showed me some attentions, partly on my 

* Being constantly almost an absentee from London, and very 
often from other great cities, so as to command oftentimes no favor- 
able opportunities for overlooking the great mass of public journals, 
it is possible enoufh that other slanders of the same tenor may 
have existed. I speak of what met my own eye, or was accident- 
ally reported to me ; but, in fact, all of us are exposed to this evil 
of calumnies lurking unseen, for no degree of energy, and no 
excess of disposable time, would enable any man to exercise this 
sort of vigilant police over all journals. Better, therefore, tran- 
quilly to leave all such malice to confound itself. 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 273 

own account as a boy of some expectations, but much 
more with the purpose of .fastening his professional 

grappling-hooks upon the young Earl of A 1, my 

former companion, and my present correspondent. This 
man's house was slightly described, and, with more 
minuteness, I had exposed some interesting traits in 
his household economy. A question, therefore, natu- 
rally arose in several people's curiosity — Where was 
this house situated? and the more so because J had 
pointed a renewed attention to it by saying, that on 
that very evening (namely, the evening on which that 
particular page of the Confessions was written) I had 
visited the street, looked up at the windows, and, 
instead of the gloomy desolation reigning there when 
myself and a little girl were the sole nightly tenants, — 
sleeping, in fact (poor freezing creatures that we both 
were), on the floor of the attorney's law-chamber, and 
making a pillow out of his infernal parchments, — I had 
seen, with pleasure, the evidences of comfort, respeat- 
ability, and domestic animation, in the lights and stir 
prevailing through different stories of the house. Upon 
this, the upright critic told his readers that I had 
described the house as standing in Oxford-street, and 
then appealed to their own knowledge • of that street 
whether such a house could be so situated. Why not 
— he neglected to tell us. The houses at the east end 
of Oxford-street are certainly of too small an order 
to meet my account of the attorney's house ; but why 
should it be at the east end ? Oxford-street is a mile 
and a quarter long, and, being built continuously on both 
sides, finds room for houses of many classes. Mean- 
time it happens that, although the true house was 
18 



274 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

most obscurely indicated, aiiy house whatever in Ox- 
ford-street was most luminously excluded. In all the 
immensity of London there was but one single street 
that could be challenged by an attentive reader of the 
Confessions as peremptorily not the street of the attor- 
ney's house, and that one was Oxford-street ; for, in 
speaking of my own renewed acquaintance w^ith the 
outside of this house, I used some expression implying 
that, in order to make such a visit of reconnoissance, 
I had turned aside from Oxford-street. The matter 
is a perfect trifle in itself, but it is no trifle in a 
question affecting a writer's accuracy. If in a thing 
so absolutely impossible to be forgotten as the true 
situation of a house painfully memorable to a man's 
feelings, from being the scene of boyish distresses the 
most exquisite, nights passed in the misery of cold, 
and hunger preying upon him, both night and day, in a 
degree which very many would not have survived, — 
he, when retracing his school-boy annals, could have 
shown indecision, even far more dreaded inaccuracy, 
in identifying the house, — not one syllable after that, 
which he could have said on any other subject, 
would have won any confidence, or deserved any, 
from a judicious reader. I may now mention — the 
Herod being dead whose persecutions I had reason to 
fear — that the house in question stands in Greek- 
street on the west, and is the house on that side near- 
est to Soho-square, but without looking into the 
square. This it was hardly safe to mention at the 
date of the published Confessions. It was my private 
opinion, indeed, that there were probably twenty-five 
chances to one in favor of my friend the attorney 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 275 

having- been by that time hanged. Bat then this 
argued inversely; one chance to twenty-five that my 
friend might be w?zhanged, and knocking about the 
streets of London ; in which case it would have been 
a perfect god-send to him that here lay an opening (of 
my contrivance, not his) for requesting the opinion of 
a jury on the amount of solatium due to his wounded 
feelings in an action on the passage in the Confessions. 
To have indicated even the street would have been 
enough ; because there could surely be but one such 
Grecian in Greek-street, or but one that realized the 
other conditions of the unknown quantity. There was 
also a separate danger not absolutely so laughable as 
it sounds. Me there was little chance that the attor- 
ney should meet ; but my book he might easily have 
met (supposing always that the warrant of Sus. per 
coll. had not yet on his account travelled down to 
Newgate). For he was literary; admired literature; 
and, as a lawyer, he wrote on some subjects fluently ; 
might he not publish his Confessions? Or, which 
would be worse, a supplement to mine, printed so as 
exactly to match ? In which case I should have had 
the same affliction that Gibbon the historian dreaded so 
much, namely, that of seeing a refutation of himself, and 
his own answer to the refutation, aU bound up in one 
and the same self-combating volume. Besides, he 
would have cross-examined me before the public, in 
Old Bailey style ; no story, the most straightforward 
that ever was told, could be sure to stand that. And 
my readers might be left in a state of painful doubt, 
whether he might not, after all, have been a model of 
suffering innocence — I (to say the kindest thing pos- 



276 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

sible) plagued with the natural treacheries of a school- 
boy's memory. In taking leave of this case and the 
remembrances connected with it, let me say that, 
although really believing in the probability of the 
attorney's having at least found his way to Australia, 
I had no satisfaction in thinking of that result. I knew 
my friend to be the very perfection of a scamp. And 
in the running account between us (I mean, in the 
ordinary sense, as to money), the balance could not be 
in his favor; since I, on receiving a sum of money 
(considerable in the eyes of us both), had transferred 
pretty nearly the whole of it to him, for the purpose 
ostensibly held out to me (but of course a hoax) of 
purchasing certain law "stamps;" for he was then 
pursuing' a diplomatic correspondence with various 
Jews who lent money to young heirs, in some trifling 
proportion on my own insignificant account, but much 

more truly on the account of Lord A 1, my young 

friend. On the other side, he had given to me sim- 
ply the relics of his breakfast-table, which itself was 
hardly more than a relic. But in this he was not to 
blame. He could not give to me what he had not for 
himself, nor sometimes for the poor starving child 
whom I now suppose to have been his illegitimate 
daughter. So desperate was the running fight, yard- 
arm to yard-arm, which he maintained with creditors 
fierce as famine and hungry as the grave, — so deep 
also was his horror (I know not for which of the various 
reasons supposable) against falling into a prison, — that 
he seldom ventured to sleep twice successively in the 
same house. That expense of itself must have pressed 
heavily in London, where you pay half a crown at least 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 277 

for a bed that would cost only a shilling in the prov- 
inces. In the nfiidst of his knaveries, and, what were 
even more shocking- to my remembrance, his confi- 
dential discoveries in his rambling conversations of 
knavish designs (not always pecuniary), there was a 
light of wandering misery in his eye, at times, which 
affected me afterwards at intervals, when I recalled it 
in the radiant happiness of nineteen, and amidst the 
solemn tranquillities of Oxford. That of itself was 
interesting; the man was worse by far than he had 
been meant to be ; he had not the mind that reconciles 
itself to evil. Besides, he respected scholarship, which 
appeared by the deference he generally showed to 
myself, then about seventeen ; he had an interest in 
literature, — that argues something good ; and was 
pleased at any time, or even cheerful, when I turned 
the conversation upon books ; nay, he seemed touched 
with emotion when I quoted some sentiment noble and 
impassioned from one of the great poets, and would 
ask me to repeat it. He would have been a man of 
memorable energy, and for good purposes, had it not 
been for his agony of conflict with pecuniary embar- 
rassments. These probably had commenced in some 
fatal compliance with temptation arising out of funds 
confided to him by a client. Perhaps he had gained 
fifty guineas for a moment of necessity, and had sacri- 
ficed for that trifle only the serenity and the comfort 
of a life. Feelings of relenting kindness it was not 
in my nature to refuse in such a case ; and I wished 
to ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 

But I never succeeded in tracing his steps through the 
wilderness of London until some years back, when I 



278 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

ascertained that he was dead. Generally speaking, the 
few people whom I have disliked in this world were 
flourishing people, of good repute. Whereas the knaves 
whom I have known, one and all, and by no means few, 
I think of with pleasure and kindness. 

Heavens ! when I look back to the sufferings which 
I have witnessed or heard of, even from this one brief 
London experience, I say, if life could throw open its 
long suites of chambers to our eyes from some station 
beforeJiand, — if, from some secret stand, we could look by 
anticijMtion along its vast corridors, and aside into the 
recesses opening upon them from either hand, — halls of 
tragedy or chambers of retribution, simply in that small 
wing and no more of the great caravanserai which we 
ourselves shall haunt, — simply in that narrow tract of 
time, and no more, where we ourselves shall range, 
and confining our gaze to those, and no others, for 
whom personally \ye shall be interested, — what a recoil 
we should suffer of horror in our estimate of life ! 
What if those sudden catastrophes, or those inexpiable 
afflictions, which have already descended upon the 
people within my own knowledge, and almost below my 
own eyes, all of them now gone past, and some long 
past, had been thrown open before me as a secret exhi- 
bition when first I and they stood within the vestibule 
of morning hopes, — when the calamities themselves had 
hardly begun to gather in their elements of possibility, 
and when some of the parties to them were as yet no 
more than infants ! The past viewed not as the past, 
but by a spectator who steps back ten years deeper into 
the rear, in order that he may regard it as a future ; 
the calamity of 1840 contemplated from the station of 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 279 

1830, — the doom that rang the knell of happiness 
viewed from a point of time when as yet it was neither 
feared nor would even have been intelligible, — the 
name that killed in 1843, which in 1835 would have 
struck no vibration upon the heart, — the portrait that 
on the day of her Majesty's coronation would have been 
admired by you with a pure disinterested admiration, 
but which, if seen to-day, would draw forth an involun- 
tary groan, — cases such as these are strangely moving 
for all who add deep thoughtfulness to deep sensibility. 
As the hastiest of improvisations, accept, fair reader 
(for reader it is that will chiefly feel such an invocation 
of the past), three or four illustrations from my own 
experience. 

Who is this distinguished-looking young woman, with 
her eyes drooping, and the shadow of a dreadful shock 
yet fresh upon every feature ? Who is the elderly lady, 
with her eyes flashing fire ? Who is the downcast 
child of sixteen ? What is that torn paper lying at 
their feet ? Who is the writer ? Whom does the paper 
concern ? Ah ! if she, if the central figure in the 
group — twenty-two at the moment when she is revealed 
to us — could, on her happy birth-day at sweet seven- 
teen, have seen the image of herself five years onwards, 
just as loe see it now, would she have prayed for life 
as for an absolute blessing? or would she not have 
prayed to be taken from the evil to come — to be taken 
away one evening, at least, before this day's sun arose ? 
It is true, she still wears a look of gentle pride, and a 
relic of that noble smile which belongs to her that 
suffers an injury which many times over she would 
have died sooner than inflict. Womanly pride refuses 



280 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

itself before witnesses to the total prostration of the 
blow; but, for all that, you may see that she longs to 
be left alone, and that her tears will flow without 
restraint when she is so. This room is her pretty 
boudoir, in which, till to-night — poor thing I — she has 
been glad and happy. There stands her miniature con- 
servatory, and there expands her miniature library; as 
we circumnavigators of literature are apt (you know) to 
regard all female libraries in the light of miniatures. 
None of these will ever rekindle a smile on her face ; 
and there, beyond, is her music, which only of all that 
she possesses will now become dearer to her than ever; 
but not, as once, to feed a self-mocked pensiveness, or 
to cheat a half visionary sadness. She will be sad, 
indeed. But she is one of those that will suflfer in 
silence. Nobody will ever detect her failing in any 
point of duty, or querulously seeking the support in 
others which she can find for herself in this solitary 
room. Droop she will not in the sight of men ; and, 
for all beyond, nobody has any concern with that^ 
except God. You shall . hear what becomes of her, 
before we take our departure ; but now let me tell you 
what has happened. In the main outline I am sure 
you guess already, without aid of mine, for we leaden- 
eyed men, in such cases, see nothing by comparison 
w4th you our quick-witted sisters. That haughty- 
looking lady, with the Roman cast of features, who must 
once have been strikingly handsome, — an Agrippina, 
even yet, in a favorable presentation, — is the younger 
lady's aunt. She, it is rumored, once sustained, in 
her 3^ounger days, some injury of that same cruel 
nature which has this day assailed her niece, and ever 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 281 

since she hfis worn an air of disdain, not altogether 
unsupported h}'' real dignity towards men. This aunt 
it was that tore the letter which lies upon the floor. It 
deserved to be torn ; and yet she that had the best right 
to do so would Twt have torn it. That letter was an 
elaborate attempt on the part of an accomplished young 
man to release himself from sacred engagements. What 
need was there to argue the case of such engagements ? 
Could it have been requisite with pure female dignity to 
plead anything, or do more than look an indisposition to 
fulfil them ? The aunt is now moving towards the 
door, which I am glad to see ; and she is followed by 
that pale, timid girl of sixteen, a cousin, who feels the 
case profoundly, but is too young and shy to offer an 
intellectual sympathy. 

One only person in this world there is who could. 
to-night have been a supporting friend to our young 
sufferer, and that is her dear, loving twin-sister, that 
for eighteen years read and wrote, thought and sang, 
slept and breathed, with the dividing-door open fprever 
between their bed-rooms, and never once a separation 
between their hearts; but she is in afar-distant land. 
Who else is there at her call? Except God, nobody. 
Her aunt had somewhat sternly admonished her, though 
still with a relenting in her eye as she glanced aside 
at the expression in her niece's face, that she must 
"call pride to her assistance." Ay, true; but pride, 
though a strong ally in public, is apt in private to turn 
as treacherous as the worst of those against whom she 
is invoked. How could it be dreamed, by a person of 
sense, that a brilliant young man, of merits various and 
eminent, in spite of his baseness, to whom, for nearly 



282 . A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

two years, this young woman had given her whole con- 
fiding love, might be dismissed from a heart like hers on 
the earliest summons of pride, simply because she 
herself had been dismissed from his, or seemed to have 
been dismissed, on a summons of mercenary calculation ? 
Look ! now that she is relieved from the weight of an 
unconfidential presence, she has sat for two hours with 
her head buried in her hands. At last she rises to look 
for something. A thought has struck her; and, taking 
a little golden key which hangs by a chain within her 
bosom, she searches for something locked up amongst 
her few jewels. What is it ? It is a Bible exquisitely 
illuminated, with a letter attached by some pretty silken 
artifice to the blank leaves at the end. This letter is a 
beautiful record, wisely and pathetically composed, ot 
maternal anxiety still burning strong in death, and 
yearning, when all objects beside were fast fading from 
her eyes, after one parting act of communion with the 
twin darlings of her heart. Both were thirteen years 
old, within a week or two, as on the night before her 
death they sat weeping by the bedside of their mother, 
and hanging on. her lips, now for farewell whispers and 
now for farewell kisses. They both knew that, as her 
strength had permitted during the latter month of her 
life, she had thrown the last anguish of love in her 
beseeching heart into a letter of counsel to themselves. 
Through this, of which each sister had a copy, she 
trusted long to converse with her orphans. And the 
last promise which she had entreated on this evening 
from both was, that in either of two contingencies they 
would review her counsels, and the passages to wdiich 
she pointed their attention in the Scriptures ; namely, 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 



283 



first, in the event of any calamity, that, for one sister or 
for both, should overspread their paths with total dark- 
ness ; and, secondly, in the event of life flowing in too 
profound a stream of prosperity, so as to threaten them 
with an alienation of interest from all spiritual objects. 
She had not concealed that, of these two extreme cases, 
she would prefer for her own children the first. And now 
had that case arrived, indeed, which she in spirit had 
desired to meet. Nine years ago, just as the silvery 
voice of a dial in the dying lady's bed-room was strik- 
ing nine, upon a summer evening, had the last visual 
ray streamed from her seekhig eyes upon her orphan 
twins, after which, throughout the night, she had slept 
away into heaven. Now again had com.e a summer 
evening memorable for unhappiness ; now again the 
daughter thought of those dying lights of love which 
streamed at sunset from the closing eyes of her mother ; 
again, and just as she went back in thought to this 
image, the same silvery voice of the dial sounded nine 
o'clock. Again she remembered her mother's dying 
request; again her own tear-hallowed promise, — and 
with her heart in her mother's grave she now rose to 
fulfil it. Here, then, when this solemn recurrence to a 
testamentary counsel has ceased to be a mere office of 
duty towards the departed, having taken the shape of a 
consolation for herself, let us pause. 

Now, fair companion in this exploring voyage of 
inquest into hidden scenes, or forgotten scenes of human 
life, perhaps it might be instructive to direct our 
glasses upon the false, perfidious lover. It might. But 
do not let us do so. We might like him better, or pity 



234 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

him m'ore, than either of us would desire. His name 
and memory have long since dropped out of every- 
body's thoughts. Of prosperity, and (what is more 
important) of internal peace, he is reputed to have had 
no gleam from the moment when he betrayed his faith, 
and in one day threw away the jewel of good con- 
scieuce, and " a pearl richer than all his tribe." But, 
however that may be, it is certain that, finally, he 
became a wreck ; and of any hopeless wreck it is pain- 
ful to talk, — much more so, when through him others 
also became wrecks. 

Shall we, then, after an interval of nearly two years 
has passed over the young lady in the boudoir, look in 
again upon her? You hesitate, fair friend; and I my- 
self hesitate. For in fact she also has become a wreck; 
and it would grieve us both to see her altered. At the 
end of twenty-one months she retains hardly a vestige of 
resemblance to the fine young woman we saw on that 
unhappy evening, with her aunt and cousin. On con- 
sideration, therefore, let us do this. — We will direct our 
glasses to her room at a point of time about six weeks 
further on. Suppose this time gone ; suppose her now 
dressed for her grave, and placed in her coffin. The 
advantage of that is, that though no change can restore 
the ravages of the past, yet (as often is found to happen 
with young persons) the expression has revived from her 
girlish 3'ears. The child-like aspect has revolved, and 
settled back upon her features. The wasting away of 
the flesh is less apparent in the face ; and one might 
imagine that in this sweet marble countenance was 
seen the very same upon which, eleven years ago, her 
mother's darkening eyes had lingered to the last, until 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 285 

clouds had swallowed up the vision of her beloved hdns. 
Yet, if that were in part a fancy, this, at least, is no 
fancy, — that not only much of a child-like truth and 
simplicity has reinstated itself in the temple of her now 
reposing features, but also that tranquillity and perfect 
peace, such as are appropriate to eternity, but which 
from the living countenance had taken their flight for- 
ever, on that memorable evening when we looked in 
upon the impassioned group, — upon the towering and 
denouncing aunt, the S3^mpathizing but silent cousin, 
the poor, blighted niece, and the wicked letter lying in 
fragments at their feet. 

Cloud, that hast revealed to us this young creature 
and her blighted hopes, close up again. And now, a 
few years later, — not more than four or five,^ — give 
back to us the latest arrears of the changes which thou 
concealest within thy draperies. Once more, " open 
sesame ! " and show us a third generation. Behold a 
lawn islanded with thickets. How perfect is the ver- 
dure ; how rich the blossoming shrubberies that screen 
with verdurous walls from the possibility of intrusion, 
whilst by their own wandering line of distribution they 
shape, and umbrageously embay, what one might call 
lawny saloons and vestibyiles, sylvan galleries and 
closets ! Some of these recesses, which unlink them- 
selves as fluently as snakes, and unexpectedly as the 
shyest nooks, watery cells, and crypts, amongst the 
shores of a forest-lake, being formed by the mere 
caprices and ramblings of the luxuriant shrubs, are so 
small and so quiet that one might fancy them meant 
for boudoirs. Here is one that in a less fickle climate 
would make the loveliest of studies for a writer of 



286 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS 

breathings from some solitary heart, or of suspiria from 
some impassioned memory! And, opening from one 
angle of this embowered study, issues a little narrow 
corridor, that, after almost wheeling back upon itself, in 
its playful mazes, finally widens into a little circular 
chamber; out of which there is no exit (except back 
again by the entrance), small or great; so that, adjacent 
to his study, the writer would command how sweet a 
bed-room, permitting him to lie the summer through, 
gazing all night long at the burning host of heaven. 
How silent that would be at the noon of summer nights, 
— how grave-like in its quiet ! And yet, need there be 
asked a stillness or a silence more profound than is felt 
at this present noon of day? One reason for such 
peculiar repose, over and above the tranquil character 
of the day, and the distance of the place from the high- 
roads, is the outer zone of woods, which almost on every 
quarter invests the shrubberies, swathing them (as one 
may express it), belting them and overlooking them, 
from a varying distance of two and three furlongs, so as 
oftentimes to keep the winds at a distance. But, how- 
ever caused and supported, the silence of these fanciful 
lawns and lawny chambers is oftentimes oppressive in the 
depths of summer to people unfamiliar with solitudes, 
either mountainous or sylvan ; and many would be apt 
to suppose that the villa, to which these pretty shrub- 
beries form the chief dependencies, must be untenanted. 
But that is not the case. The house is inhabited, and 
by its own legal mistress, the proprietress of the whole 
domain ; and not at all a silent mistress, but as noisy as 
most little ladies of five years old, for that is her age. 
Now, and just as we are speaking, you may hear her 



OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 287 

little joyous clamor, as she issues from the house. This 
way she comes, bounding like a fawn ; and soon she 
rushes into the little recess which I pointed out as a 
proper study for any man who should be weaving the 
deep harmonies of memorial siispiria. But I fancy that 
she will soon dispossess it of that character, for her siis- 
piria are not many at this stage of her life. Now she 
comes dancing into sight; and you see that, if she 
keeps the promise of her infancy, she will be an inter- 
esting creature to the eye in after life. In other respects, 
also, she is an engaging child, — loving, natural, and 
wild as any one of her neighbors for some miles round, 
namely, leverets, squirrels, and ring-doves. But what 
will surprise you most is, that, although a child of pure 
English blood, she speaks very little English; but more 
Bengalee than perhaps you will find it convenient to 
construe. That is her ayah, who comes up from behind, 
at a pace so different from her youthful mistress'. But, 
if their paces are different, in other things they agree 
most cordially; and dearly they love each other. In 
reality, the child has passed her whole life in the arms 
of this ayah. She remembers nothing elder than her ; 
eldest of things is the ayah in her eyes ; and, if the 
ayah should insist on her worshipping herself as the 
goddess Railroadina or Steamboatina, that made Eng- 
land, and the sea, and Bengal, it is certain that the 
little thing would do so, asking no question but this, — 
whether kissing would do for worshipping. 

Every evening at nine o'clock, as the ayah sits by the 
little creature lying awake in bed, the silvery tongue of 
a dial tolls the hour. Reader, you know who she is. 
She is the grand-daughter of her that faded away about 



288 A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS, 'eTC. 

sunset in gazing at her twin orphans. Her name is 
Grace. ^And she is the niece of that elder and once 
happy Grace, who spent so much of her happiness in 
this very room, but whom, in her utter desolation, we 
sav; in the boudoir, with the torn letter at her feet. She 
is the daughter of that other sister, wife to a military 
officer who died abroad. Little Grace never saw her 
grandmamma, nor her lovely aunt, that was her name- 
sake, nor consciously her mamma. She was born six 
months after the death of the elder Grace ; and her 
mother saw her only through the mists of mortal suffer- 
ing, which carried her off three weeks after the birth of 
her daughter. 

This view was taken several years ago; and since 
then the younger Grace, in her turn, is under a cloud 
of affliction. But she is still under eighteen ; and of 
her there may be hopes. Seeing such things in so short 
a space of years, for the grandmother died at thirty-two, 
we say, — Death we can face : but knowing, as some of 
us do, what is human life, which of us is it that without 
shuddering could (if consciously we were summoned) 
face the hour of birth ? 



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